{"id": "63521_1", "pid": "63521_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27549, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Noork is in a tree on a moon named Sekk, watching a woman walk through the jungle.  When they speak, they learn that Noork has been living with her brother, Gurn.  With this introduction, they begin to travel together.\n\nThe woman explains that she had been captured by slavers in the past but had escaped.  The escapees were then followed by the Misty Ones, and the woman was the only one who made a complete escape.  Noork states that he will visit the island where the Misty Ones live one day, but the woman does not answer. When Noork turns back to her, she has disappeared, and Noork is attacked.  He hides in the trees and spies the Misty Ones below.  He throws fruit down on them until he can easily see them by the stains the fruit makes on their clothing, then attacks with arrows.  The Misty Ones flee except for one who has been killed with an arrow.  Noork takes the robe of this one and sets off toward the Temple of the Skull, the home of the Misty Ones, to free the woman.\n\nNoork encounters Ud, his friend, near the lake, and tells him to tell Gurn that the MIsty Ones can be trapped and skinned.  He asks Ud to tell Gurn that Noork is going to save Gurn's \"father's woman woman\" called Sarna.\n\nNoork paddles across the lake and sneaks close to the Temple of the Skull.  He falls asleep in a tree and is awakened by the conversation of two slaves talking about Sarna.  After one slave leaves, he speaks with the other slave, Rold, and tells him that he is there to rescue Sarna.  Rold, realizing that the Misty Ones are only mortal men, tells Noork that Sarna is held in a pit beneath the temple with the other young women slaves.\n\nNoork finds the entrance to the pit but is blocked by two guards, whom he kills.He then proceeds to the cage where the young women are held, where he is confronted by a priest.  He fights the priest, kills him, and frees Sarna.  They go back to the field, get Rold, and the three of them flee into the jungle.  They plan to go for a boat and leave, but are caught by Misty Ones waiting to trap them.  At this time, Dr. Von Mark, a Nazi from Earth, confronts Noork, who is also Stephen Dietrich, an American pilot who has been hunting him and had tracked him through space to Sekk.  Due to Dietrich/Noork's amnesia, he remembers none of this.  Just as Von Mark is about to kill him, Gurn and other men from Wari kill the Misty Ones with arrows and Noork and the others are freed.  Noork states that he can now live in peace with Gurn and Sarna in the jungle."}
{"id": "63521_1", "pid": "63521_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27549, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Noork, a man from Earth who doesn\u2019t remember who he is, lives in the jungle on a second moon. He knows he was brought there by what he remembers as a huge bird and that he was taken in by a man named Gurn and the Vasad people of the jungle. He meets a woman named Sarna with whom he shares a mutual attraction, and it turns out that she is Gurn\u2019s sister. Shortly after they discover this, they are attacked. Sarna vanishes and Noork hides, eventually discovering that the \u201cMisty Ones\u201d who attacked them, thought to be demons, look similar to him and can be \u201cskinned\u201d; this is important because their skins or coverings allow the wearer to be nearly invisible like them. \n\nNoork passes a message along via another Vasad to tell Gurn what he has learned about the Misty Ones, and to say that Noork has gone to rescue Sarna. He sneaks into the walled temple where the slaves are being kept, and enlists the help of another slave, Rold, to help them get out if he can get Sarna. Noork goes down to the cavern and, after fighting a priest to the death, rescues Sarna. They escape with Rold, only to be captured by more Misty Ones, one of whom turns out to be a Nazi from Noork\u2019s previous life. \n\nThough Noork can\u2019t remember him (but knows he dislikes him), Doctor Von Mark remembers him. Noork\u2019s name was Stephen Dietrich, and he was an American flier who had chased down one of the last nazi criminals: Doctor Von Mark. Von Mark had then flown one of his shuttles to Sekk and landed successfully, while Stephen had pursued him in another of his shuttles and crashed on Sekk, resulting in his amnesia. \u201cNoork\u201d was the name given to him by the Vasad based on the only sounds he could make: \u201cNew York\u201d. \n\nDoctor Von Mark asks if Noork knows the secret to the invisibility of the Misty One\u2019s skins, since this would allow him to return to Earth and take it over for the Fatherland. When he realizes that Noork knows nothing, he moves to kill him but is shot by an arrow just in time. Gurn has rallied warriors based on Noork\u2019s message. Noork now knows his real name and that he got where he is by hunting down an evil man. He is now happy to live safely in the jungle with Gurn and Sarna, and she says she is happy, too. \n"}
{"id": "63521_1", "pid": "63521_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27549, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Noork is a man from Earth whose real name is Stephen Dietrich; he was pursuing the Nazi Dr. Karl Von Mark, the last of the Axis criminals at large. Dietrich followed Von Mark to Africa where Von Mark took off in a spaceship, and Dietrich followed. Both landed on Sekk, a second moon past Luna, but Dietrich\u2019s landing was so rough that he lost his memory. When the locals found him, he said, \u201cNew York,\u201d which they didn\u2019t understand and named him Noork. Noork lives among the Vasads and learns their language. \n\nNoork and Tholon Sarna meet in the jungle and become friends. One day as they are talking, Noork hears feet scuffing, and Tholon disappears. Noork climbs a tree to find out where the Misty Ones are (They are invisible.). He detects movement and throws overripe fruit, which stains the cloaks of the Misty Ones. Noork shoots arrows toward the creatures and kills one. He takes that one\u2019s robe, which is what makes the Misty Ones invisible. \n\nNoork tells one of his colleagues to take the message to Gurn, their leader and Tholon\u2019s brother, that the Misty Ones are flesh and blood, not demons as they believe. He tells Ud that he is going to the island of the Misty Ones to save Tholon. He reaches the wall surrounding the Misty Ones\u2019 village and overhears two slaves talking before they separate. Noork approaches the slave in the field, Rold, and asks for his help in exchange for helping Rold escape. Rold explains that the large skull is the god Uzdon, and the priests make sacrifices by taking the heart out of a living slave girl. He also tells Noork that the slave girls are held in a pit beneath the skull guarded by Misty Ones.\n\nNoork moves among the Misty Ones in anonymity since he is wearing one of their robes. He enters the skull and kills the guards who are in charge of the slave girls. Just as he is about to release Tholon, a priest catches him, and they fight until Noork kills him, too. Noork takes more robes and the priest\u2019s face shield and leaves with Tholon and Rold. The face shield enables him to see the Misty Ones who are invisible to everyone else, so he can see when they are waiting to trap them. They capture the escape party, and one of the Misty Ones reveals that he is Dr. Von Mark after recognizing Dietrich. Von Mark reveals his plans to use the cloaks of invisibility to conquer Earth and make Germany invincible. Von Mark prepares to shoot Dietrich but is shot by an arrow first. Misty Ones close in on the group and lower their hoods, revealing Tholon\u2019s brother Gurn and his men. Noork now remembers who he is and says he will live in peace with Gurn and his sister.\n"}
{"id": "63521_1", "pid": "63521_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27549, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Noork searches for the bird that dropped him on a cliff (as well as another bird) when he is discovered by the Vasads. He repeated the word \"New York\", and so the Vasads call him Noork. From his perch, he now watches a girl\u2014Tholon Sarna--moving along a trail below. She is the sister of Gurn, the Vasad leader. Gurn has been exiled from their home city of Grath because he doesn't believe in the enslavement of the Zuran, and Tholon Sarna has recently evaded capture by her enemies, the men of Konto. The Misty Ones--slavers dwellling at the Temple of the Skull and feared deeply by the Vasads--follow her. As Tholon Sarna and Noork walk, she is captured by a Misty One made invisible by a special robe. A Misty One clubs Noork, injuring his arm. Thanks to their blurry outlines, Noork realizes the Misty Ones are not entirely invisible, and he uses his legs to pelt them with fruit. Upon seeing their true form--closer to his own human shape--Noork loses his fear of them and begins attacking them with arrows. He takes the invisibility robe of a fallen Misty One and uses it to disguise himself as he makes his way to the Temple of the Skull. Along the way, he reunites with his friend Ud, a jungle-dwelling beast-man. He sends Ud to inform Gurn of the Misty Ones' newfound weakness. We then learn that Noork's real name is Stephen Dietrich, and he had been hunting Dr. Karl Von Mark, a criminal scientist attempting to revivify the Nazi power structure. Von Mark manages to evade Dietrich by landing on Sekk, and Dietrich crashes and succumbs to amnesia. The bird that had carried him to the cliff was his own plane, and the bird he had been seeking was Von Mark's. Now, Noork descends upon a slave named Rold near the Temple of the Skull. He enlists Rold to help him free Tholon Sarna. Rold informs Noork of the High Priest's plan to choose a sacrifice to their god, Uzdon, from the female slaves caged in a pit beneath the Skull. Noork promises a robe to Rold if his plan to rescue Tholon Sarna succeeds. In disguise, Noork approaches the Skull, heavily guarded by Misty Ones, and makes his way toward the pit. Along the way, he defeats guards and pockets two robes. Before freeing Tholon Sarna, Noork battles the High Priest, kills him, and they make their escape. Soon after, they are again trapped by a group of Misty Ones--this time led by none other than Dr. Karl Von Mark himself. Von Mark tells Noork of his desire to use the secret of invisibility to make Germany all-powerful, and he pulls out a gun to kill him. Suddenly, Gurn emerges with the Vasads, and they kill Von Mark with arrows. Noork recalls his true identify as Captain Dietrich and looks forward to a life of peace amongst the Vasads with Tholon Sarna."}
{"id": "63521_2", "pid": "63521_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins in thick jungle on Sekk, which we are told is a \"second moon\" which retains a \"breathable atmosphere\" around a lake surrounded by eleven jungled valleys.  In this way, it is implied that Sekk is a second moon of Earth.\n\nIn the jungle, we meet Noork and a young woman named Sarna.  They begin traveling together through the jungle, but soon Sarna disappears and Noork is attacked.  This is our first encounter with the Misty Ones, who blend in with the jungle foliage.  Noork defeats the Misty Ones and continues toward the lake and island where they make their home.\n\nNoork briefly encounters his friend Ud near the marshy lowlands that lie between the jungled valleys on Sekk and the central Lake of Uzdon, but this area is not described.  When Noork reaches the central island in the lake, we encounter a non-jungle landscape for the first time.  Noork finds himself in a cultivated field, and sees the shape of a huge white skull about half a mile away.  After speaking with an enslaved man and learning where Sarna is being held, Noork continues toward the skull.\n\nThe skull is a dome of white stone, with black stone for eye-sockets and nose-holes.  The interior contains a raised altar made of precious metals--gold, silver, and brass--and precious stones, as well as stone images of the two gods the Misty Ones worship.  Below the altar is the caged area where the young women are held; Noork detects the entrance to this area by its foul odor.  The room where the young women are kept is dimly lit by only two torches, very damp with pools of dirty water all around, and holds at least twenty young women.  They have nothing to sit on but rotten grass mats.  In contrast to the enslaved men who are out in the cultivated fields and open air, the young women are in a desperate situation indeed.  They can only sit in their foul, rotting prison and wait to be sacrificed."}
{"id": "63521_2", "pid": "63521_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place sometime after World War II on a second moon that is obscured by the moon we know and is known as Sekk. The moon Sekk has a diameter of less than five-hundred miles and a thirty-two-hour revolution, and it has a breathable atmosphere that sustains life. Life on Sekk is concentrated within a star-shaped cavity that features a lake and eleven valleys branching out from it, all of which contain jungles. The action of the story happens in the jungle areas, the lake, a walled temple, and the cavern prison beneath it. \n"}
{"id": "63521_2", "pid": "63521_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Sekk, the second moon, beyond Luna and blocked from Earth\u2019s view by Luna. Sekk is less than 500 miles in diameter and has a revolution period of 32 hours. It has a breathable atmosphere and features a star-shaped center surrounded by twelve valleys thick with jungle growth. Some trees are over forty feet tall; Noork uses these trees to surveil the area around him. Several groups live on Sekk in different villages, and there are dangerous wild animals called spotted narls. There is a mysterious group of beings, believed to be demons, called the Misty Ones because they are invisible. They live on an island in the middle of a lake and have a huge skull that represents their god, Uzdon. Female slaves are held captive in a pit beneath the skull. The story takes place after World War II, when the Allies were searching for Nazi officers to stand trial for their war crimes. Dr. Karl Von Mark is one of the Nazi officials, and he makes his way to Africa, pursued by the American Stephen Dietrich. They both fly into space and land on Sekk where Von Mark works on his scheme to return and take over the Earth, and Dietrich loses his memory and becomes known as Noork."}
{"id": "63521_2", "pid": "63521_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on a small moon called Sekk, five hundred miles wide with a thirty-two-hour day. The atmosphere on Sekk supports life, which exists in rich abundance within a star-like depression in its earth. Deep in this depression is a lake surrounded by twelve vast, green valleys and jungles. The jungles are dense and covered with massive trees that look like giants. Many of these trees have sticky fruits that Noork later uses to help him see the Misty Ones.  Noork paddles across the lake in order to reach the island of Manak, which is home to the Temple of Skull where the Misty Ones make their sacrifices to the gods Uzdon and Lornu. The Temple is comprised mostly of stone, and the sacrificial altar is made of brass, gold, and silver. After navigating through the Temple to find Tholon Sarna, he eventually ends up in \u201cthe pit\u201d\u2014a cavern dimly lit with torches and peppered with dark standing water. After their escape from the Temple, they are once again stopped by Misty Ones in a grassy inlet back on the mainland. This is where Dr. Von Mark reveals Noork\u2019s true identity to him and is killed by Gurn and the Vasads."}
{"id": "63521_3", "pid": "63521_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Gurn's role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "We first hear Gurn's name mentioned by Noork in his initial meeting with Sarna.  He tells her that he has been living with the wild Vasads of the jungle with Gurn, his friend and their chief.  Noork goes on to say that Gurn is an exile from the walled city of Grath and asks Sarna if she knows why this is.  Sarna says that her brother says they should no longer enslave Zurans they capture from other valleys.  In this way, their relationships with Gurn build a bridge between them, allowing them to consider a relationship with one another.\n\nGurn is next mentioned when Noork encounters his friend Ud near the central lake of Sekk, the moon they are on.  Noork asks Ud to go to their mutual friend Gurn and pass on a message.  Noork asks Ud to tell Gurn that the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.  When Ud wonders why anyone would want to do such a thing, Noork tells him that Noork is trying to save Gurn's \"father's woman woman\", as he describes Gurn's sister Sarna.\n\nGurn then arrives as something between a hero and a deus ex machina at the very end of the story.  Noork, Sarna, and Rold, an enslaved man who helped Noork free Sarna, are about to be murdered by Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones, when Gurn and his allies arrive and shoot the enemy full of arrows, saving all their lives.  Gurn reveals that he received Ud's messages and they were trapping the Misty Ones as they came across the lake and stealing their robes so they could come to Noork's rescue.  Without Gurn, Noork and Sarna would never have traveled together in the first place, nor would they have been rescued at the end."}
{"id": "63521_3", "pid": "63521_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Gurn's role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gurn is described as a renegade and the leader of the Vasad, a hairy people living in the jungle on Sekk. He is tall, strong, golden-skinned, and has proven to be a friend to Noork. He wears bracelets connected by human hair. He has been exiled from the city of Grath because he spoke out against keeping the captured people from other valleys as slaves. He is Sarna\u2019s brother, and she seems to trust Noork more when he mentions Gurn. After he and Sarna are attacked, Noork passes a message to another Vasad, Ud, to tell Gurn that the \u201cmisty people\u201d they fear can be killed and their skins used to conceal them, and that he\u2019s going to save Sarna. Later, after Noork and Sarna are captured by the Nazi Doctor Von Mark, Gurn and some warriors show up just in time to save them. \n"}
{"id": "63521_3", "pid": "63521_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Gurn's role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gurn is Tholon Sarna\u2019s brother and the leader of a group of Vasads. He is tall and strong, wears a bracelet made of gold discs linked together with human hair, and talks with his own shadow when he thinks. Gurn was exiled from the city of Grath, whose leaders called him a traitor for voicing his opinion that they should not make their captured Zurans slaves. When Noork leaves to rescue Tholon from the Misty Ones, he sends word to Gurn via Ud that the Misty Ones are not demons but flesh and bone beings who can be trapped and skinned and that he is going to rescue Gurn\u2019s sister from the Misty Ones. At the end of the story, when Von Mark and his men have captured Noork, Tholon, and Rold, Gurn and his men arrive and pelt the Waris with arrows to rescue Noork and the others. Gurn and his men had been trapping Misty Ones on their way to the Misty Ones\u2019 city of Uzdon to rescue Noork when they came across Von Mark and the Waris holding Noork and the others. "}
{"id": "63521_3", "pid": "63521_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Gurn's role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27552, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gurn is the golden-skinned leader of the Vasads and Tholon Sarna\u2019s brother. Gurn discovers Noork when he first lands on Sekk and reminds him that he has not always lived in the valleys of the moon. As leader of the Vasads, Gurn has been exiled from his home city of Grath for speaking out against the enslavement of the people of Zura. Gurn and the Vasads fear the Misty Ones that make sacrifices to Uzdon at the Temple of the Skull, believing they are gods or demons. When Noork discovers the Misty Ones can be shed of their invisibility, he sends his friend Ud to inform Gurn. Upon hearing this news, Gurn brings the Vasads to rescue his sister, Tholon Sarna, and they arrive just in time to prevent Dr. Von Mark from killing Noork. Instead, Gurn kills Dr. Von Mark by shooting him with arrows, and Noork decides to live in peace with him, the Vasads, and Tholon Sarna."}
{"id": "63521_4", "pid": "63521_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of enslavement in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27572, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Enslavement and freedom as themes run throughout the story.  When Noork and Sarna first meet each other in the opening scene, one of the ways they decide to trust one another is because of their mutual relationships with Gurn, a third character.  Gurn has been exiled from the city of Grath because he says that his people should no longer enslave the captured Zurans from other valleys of Sekk.  In the next scene, we learn that Sarna, Gurn's sister, was kidnapped by one group of slavers, escaped them with four others, and only narrowly escaped capture by a second group of slavers, the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull, who captured the other four of her group.  Noork tells her that one day he will visit the island of Misty Ones who took her friends.  At this time, he realizes that Sarna has disappeared, and he is attacked by the Misty Ones, though he is able to fight them off.\n\nDuring Noork's travels to the island of the Misty Ones, we learn his backstory: he is American pilot Stephen Dietrich, and he arrived on the moon of Sekk by following Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Nazi criminals at large.  Dietrich's ship had crashed on Sekk, robbing him of his memory.  In the conflict between the Allies and Nazis, we again see the conflict between enslavement and freedom:  the Nazis forced those they considered racially \"impure\" into prison camps where they were either murdered outright or forced to engage in labor under inhumane conditions until they died; the Allied forces were a hope of freedom for these imprisoned, enslaved people.\n\nNoork spies on enslaved men in the fields outside the temple of the Misty Ones and hears them gossiping about Sarna.  The older man suggests that their life is not so bad, but the younger man protests and states that one day he plans to escape.  Noork approaches the younger man to find out where Sarna is being held and promises to take him along when he and Sarna escape.  Noork then fights off multiple guards and a priest in order to free Sarna from the pit where she is held, which is dank and full of rotting grass mats and little light.\n\nWhile the story touches on themes of enslavement and freedom, it does not engage with them fully.  The dungeon where the enslaved young women is held is described in foul terms, but Noork does not seem to free all the young women from their prison.  That may happen as a result of Gurn's final attack on Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones, but Noork escapes only with Sarna and Rold.  Rold is unhappy with being enslaved, not because he is being harmed or others are, but because he is not free to mate with attractive young women like Sarna.  While the story should not need to spell out every reason why enslavement is wrong, it takes a very superficial approach to a deeply painful issue."}
{"id": "63521_4", "pid": "63521_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of enslavement in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27572, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Enslavement is a major theme throughout the story. Gurn has been exiled for speaking out against the slavery that his people have inflicted on others, which is how he a Noork find one another. Noork\u2019s travels during the action of the story are undertaken in an effort to save Sarna, who has now been enslaved twice. The person he enlists to help him, Rold, is also a slave. When Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones ambush Noork and the doctor recognizes him as Stephen Dietrich, he mentions that the trapper has now become the trapped. A moment later, Gurn and the other warriors free Noork from the doctor\u2019s enslavement. Most of the story involves various people being enslaved or feeling a certain way about enslavement, and the element of Nazism in the story also lends it a broader theme of the enslavement that that regime inflicted and tried to inflict, and the continued possession of the Earth that Von Mark is working toward. \n"}
{"id": "63521_4", "pid": "63521_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of enslavement in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27572, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Enslavement seems to be the preferred way to deal with enemies on Sekk, and when Gurn speaks out against enslaving their Zuran captives, the city rulers label him a traitor and exile him from the city. His sister, Tholon, was captured by slavers but managed to escape with four others. However, when they passed near the Lake of Uzdon, the Misty Ones captured her four fellow escapees. And while Tholon is telling her story to Noork, she is kidnapped by the Misty Ones and spirited away to their city of Uzdon. The Misty Ones offer beautiful slave girls chosen by their priests as sacrifices to their god Uzdon, binding them to the altar and removing their hearts while still alive. The Misty Ones also enslave others to be workers. Slaves work in their cultivated fields and gardens, and in the skull, slaves are chained together with heavy chains. "}
{"id": "63521_4", "pid": "63521_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of enslavement in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27572, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Enslavement is an important topic in the story as many of the Zuran peoples are enslaved by various groups. The men of Kanto are enemies of the Vasads and the people of Grath, but the city of Grath also enslaves people. When Gurn speaks out against the practice, he is exiled from Grath and becomes transient with his group of Vasads. When Noork first meets Tholon Sarna, she has fled her initial enslavement, narrowly avoided enslavement by the men of Kanto, and is then captured by the Misty Ones, who also have slaves working on the island of Manak. Noork frees Rold from his enslavement, and enlists his help to prevent Tholon Sarna from becoming a human sacrifice to Uzdon. When the Vasads defeat the Misty Ones and Dr. Von Mark, they are free to live in their own society without the constraints of slavery."}
{"id": "63521_5", "pid": "63521_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Misty Ones in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27575, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Misty Ones are a group of highly feared beings, thought to be supernatural in some way at the beginning of the story because of their ability to remain unseen.  Noork, however, is able to catch a glimpse of the bottom of one of their feet from his vantage point high in a tree and begins to pelt the area where he believes they are with fruit.  After this, he can see their outlines and that they are wearing robes with hoods, and he ceases to be afraid and attacks with arrows, killing one of the Misty Ones.  He disrobes this man, who is described as heavily scarred on his face, having a low forehead, with more hair on his body and less golden skin than other men of Zuran.  Once Noork is sure that the Misty Ones are not supernatural, he decides to pursue them in an attempt to rescue Sarna, sister of his friend Gurn, who has been kidnapped by them.\n\nNoork spreads the word to his friend Ud that the Misty Ones are not demons and can be trapped and skinned and lets Ud know of his rescue mission for Sarna.  He also tells Rold, an enslaved man on the island of the Misty Ones and the priests of Uzdon (the god who demands sacrifice of young women).  Rold decides he will help Noork with his rescue mission in exchange for Noork's promise to rescue him as well--realizing that he is imprisoned by men and not demons has allowed him to dream that he can kill his captors and be free.\n\nWhen Noork fights a priest of Uzdon in order to free Sarna, he learns that the priests not only have the robes of concealment the Misty Ones have, they also have transparent masks that allow them to see through that concealment.  It allows him to anticipate their ambush at the end of the story, though not quite soon enough to stop it.  Gurn, though, has received his message and acted on it.  He has been capturing and \"skinning\" Misty Ones who have crossed the lake and he and his warriors ambush the Misty Ones and priests in return, freeing Noork and his friends.  With the realization that the Misty Ones are men with special cloaks rather than demons with supernatural powers, their mystique evaporates and everyone they have terrorized is willing to attack them.  Characters unwilling to battle demons are unafraid to attack men."}
{"id": "63521_5", "pid": "63521_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Misty Ones in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27575, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Misty Ones are significant for several reasons. They are creatures that come from the island in the lake of Uzdon, and they look like mist and are therefore nearly invisible to most (other than the priests). They are thought to be demons and perhaps invincible, but Noork discovers otherwise when he gets close enough to see that they look like him. He passes a message along to Gurn that they can be trapped and skinned. Noork\u2019s discovery of this allows him to rescue Sarna and allows Gurn and the other warriors to rescue them from Doctor Von Mark. \n"}
{"id": "63521_5", "pid": "63521_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Misty Ones in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27575, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Misty Ones are mysterious beings who are invisible and cause problems for others. With so little is known about them other than their devious acts, they are considered demons. They live on an island in the Lake of Uzdon and have a giant skull known as the Temple of the Skull that represents their god, Uzdon, to whom they over living female sacrifices. The Misty Ones wear cloaks that make them invisible, and until Noork shoots and kills one with an arrow, no one knows that they are flesh and bone beings underneath their robes. Noork discovers they look very much like he does but with a low, sloping forehead and more body hair. When the Misty Ones kidnap Tholon, Noork notices he can see a foot of one of them because it was covered with mud. He throws overripe fruit at the group, and the fruit stains their cloaks, enabling Noork to see them. The Misty Ones capture girls to be slave sacrifices to their god, but they also capture men who work for them in their fields and gardens and others who move through the skull all chained together. They are led by priests who also wear cloaks that make them invisible and colorful feathers along with a face shield that enables them to see the other Misty Ones in their cloaks. Once Noork discovers that the Misty Ones are like everyone else, the Misty Ones lose the advantage of the fear they engender in others and risk death at their hands.\n"}
{"id": "63521_5", "pid": "63521_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRaiders of the Second Moon\n \n\n By GENE ELLERMAN\n \n \n A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory, and had brought him to this tiny world\u2014to write an end to his first existence.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us. But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by Luna's bulk, we know little.\n \n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk, life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n \n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a sheathed dagger.\n \n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration. Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest, and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had confirmed that belief.\n \n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated them aloud.\n \n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n \n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle giant. Noork grinned.\n \n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n \n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you hunter or escaped slave?\"\n \n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted narl last night when it attacked you.\"\n \n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n \n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n \n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for my friend.\"\n \n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n \n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n \n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n \n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\n \n \n\n \n The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n \n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.\"\n \n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n \n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n \n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.\"\n \n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n \n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n \n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n \n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\n \n \n \n Noork\n \n \n \n At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.\n \n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n \n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.\n \n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n \n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n \n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n \n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.\n \n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this.\"\n \n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n \n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\n \n \n\n \n Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.\n \n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n \n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water will trap you.\"\n \n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n \n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n \n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned.\"\n \n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n \n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman called Sarna.\"\n \n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.\n \n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n \n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n \n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n \n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich\u2014whose memory was gone completely\u2014again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n \n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n \n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\n \n \n\n \n Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.\n \n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.\n \n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n \n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n \n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n \n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n \n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together beneath his tree.\n \n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than another's.\"\n \n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n \n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a good woman\u2014and ugly, my son.\"\n \n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n \n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions, are not unkind.\n \n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n \n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back, and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n \n \n\n \n \"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently.\n \n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n \n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n\"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n \n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape from the island I will take you along.\"\n \n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n \n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n \n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n \n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n \n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple pits.\"\n \n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n \n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I talked with you?\"\n \n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\n \n \n\n \n The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.\n \n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n \n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.\n \n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal\u2014gold, silver and brass\u2014vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.\n \n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped\u2014mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n \n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n \n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.\n \n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen.\"\n \n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n \n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.\n \n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n \n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.\n \n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n \n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n \n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n \n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.\n \n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n \n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n \n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl, was held prisoner.\n \n \n\n \n The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and toward this Noork made his way.\n \n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n \n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope hide.\n \n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n \n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n \n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n \n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n \n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n \n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do not trust your guards, then.\"\n \n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me your face before I kill you!\"\n \n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he offered.\n \n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n \n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n \n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple, and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his enemy.\n \n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n \n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms. Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n \n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n \n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n \n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the new robe.\n \n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's curious violet eyes\u2014-all that was visible through the narrow vision slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the girl's hand.\n \n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is given.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Misty Ones in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27507, "query_start_index": 27509, "query_end_index": 27575, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Misty Ones are a group of people who mostly dwell on the island of Manak. They control a group of slaves on the island and manage the sacrificial rituals for the gods they worship, Uzdon and Lornu. To complete these sacrifices, they habitually capture and imprison young women from around the land of Zura, and they choose the youngest and most beautiful to sacrifice. The Misty Ones inspire fear in the hearts of the Vasads and other peoples of Zura due to their mysterious nature and their ability to move about invisibly. However, their weakness is revealed when Noork discovers they are not completely invisible after all, and their \u201cskin\u201d (an invisibility robe) can be easily removed. Noork has his friend Ud pass this message along to Gurn and his Vasads to encourage them to no longer fear the Misty Ones. This tactic works, and the Vasads show up just in time to save the day."}
{"id": "62244_1", "pid": "62244_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Willard and Larry Dobbin are astronauts who have been in space for four years on the rocket Mary Lou, and as Dobbin is dying, he regrets that he will not see Earth again. Willard assures him that they will make it back, but he knows that they will never make it back because their ship was damaged by a meteor. Although the ship can still carry out functions to support life, it is not navigable. After Willard helps Dobbin look at the stars one more time, Dobbin cries out that it\u2019s true\u2014when an astronaut is dying, the Ghost Ship comes for him. \n\nWillard recycles Dobbin\u2019s body but feels regretful about it. He longs to see the Earth again and walk on it, but he knows this will never happen and feels intensely lonely. After two years, a strange thing happens. Willard is looking at the stars, and it seems that they are winking at him. Something seems to be moving toward him, and it turns out to be an ancient ship. Willard\u2019s gauges do not register the ship\u2019s presence although he sees it with his own eyes, and Willard realizes that it is the Ghost Ship coming for him. Strangely enough, however, the ship turns away and moves away from him.\n\nSeven years later, a newspaper on Earth publishes a story that Willard\u2019s son, J. Willard II, plans to build a larger version of his father\u2019s ship, the Mary Lou II, in memory of his father, but Willard Sr. is unaware of this. He continues to experience excruciating loneliness and dreams about his life on Earth\u2014the people he knew, the sounds, and the cities. One day a giant rocket ship comes alongside the Mary Lou, and Willard is thrilled that he has been discovered. But the vessel turns away and leaves. Willard notices that he can see starlight through the ship and realizes it is the Ghost Ship. \n\nOne day he sees another ship and, at first, fears the Ghost Ship has returned. The new ship looks solid, though, and it contacts him, addressing the Mary Lou by name. Willard believes that this ship will take him back to Earth and eagerly boards it. Willard is kept drugged for a while but eventually is alert enough to speak with the captain. When Willard asks when they will return to Earth, the captain explains that they cannot return because matter in space loses its mass and energy until nothing is left. If they tried to return to Earth, they would pass through it. Willard then realizes he is on the Ghost Ship, and he is one of its Ghosts.  \n\n"}
{"id": "62244_1", "pid": "62244_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Galactic Ghost begins with death. John Willard is taking care of his co-pilot and best friend, Larry Dobbin as he dies. A meteor struck their rocket ship, the Mary Lou, and damaged both her and Dobbin. As Dobbin dies, Willard gently takes care of him and lifts him up to the port so he can see the stars one last time. Just before he passes, Dobbin cries out and says he saw the infamous ghost ship. It steals dying spacemen who have no hope of returning to Earth, cursing them to spend the rest of their lives as ghosts in space. \nAfter Dobbin passes, Willard watches over him for two days before removing his body and turning it into energy for the useless engine in the Mary Lou. Although the ship is livable, it is not flyable. Taking careful diligence to check every part of the ship, Willard manages to keep the Mary Lou from completely shutting down. He transforms waste into food and learns to survive. \nTwo years of great loneliness and despair pass. As Willard looks out the port, he sees blinking stars. Excited, he investigates and realizes that it was an old-fashioned spaceship from decades ago. He soon sees that half of it is invisible, hence the blinking star phenomenon. As the ship gets closer, his sensors remain quiet. Putting it all together, he concludes that this is the Ghost Ship, but pushes the thought away, claiming it\u2019s impossible. Slowly, the ship turns around and travels away from him. \nFlash forward seven more years and a newspaper published a story about Willard and Dobbin on Earth. Sadly, he would never get to see it. Willard\u2019s son was about to create his own ship called Mary Lou II to honor his father. Willard spends his years alone trying to survive and also trying to fight off his memories of home, as they torture him. He kept up with the days and nights of Earth for many years and made his bed. But the memories of his old friends, the cities he lived in, and the crunch of snow beneath his feet drove him mad. Quickly, he lost track of the days. Another ship came and went, torturing him with hope yet again. \nAlmost twenty years passed and he grew more anguished every day. A ship came toward him and asked if he wanted to board, seeing as his ship was unlivable. Grateful he had checked the space suit beforehand, Willard traveled to the other ship and quickly fell into a deep sleep, exhausted by his years of solitude. After being drugged and evaded, Willard finally gets to speak to the captain of the ship on the third week who reveals that this is the Ghost Ship. Willard was only able to perceive the Ghost Ship because he and the Mary Lou were already ghosts, faded to the human eye. They are only shells on the Ghost Ship, and Willard is doomed to join them forever. "}
{"id": "62244_1", "pid": "62244_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Willard's and Larry Dobbin's ship the \"Mary Lou\" had been damaged by a meteor during its mission to explore a small planet beyond Pluto, and Willard and Dobbin are waiting to die in space. Eventually, Dobbin dies, and he claims to see the fabled \"Ghost Ship\" seconds before his passing. After Dobbin's death, Willard manages to stay alive thanks to the machines that could convert waste into food and air. Willard spends two years alone, lost in hopeless thought and agony. Eventually, he sees a blinking shape in the distance, which he soon determines is an old-fashioned rocket ship. However, his instruments indicate there is no ship despite what he sees. Willard oscillates between doubting his own vision and believing there must be a scientific explanation for it. As he struggles with these thoughts, the ship leaves, and Willard spends seven years alone. Meanwhile, back on Earth, a newspaper from his hometown of Arden publishes an obituary of Willard and Dobbin indicating Willard\u2019s son\u2019s intention to build a \u201cMary Lou II.\u201d Willard recalls memories with his wife and co-workers and the feeling of walking around Arden. He thinks about the legend of the Ghost Ship, which is said to come for the spacemen who die in space alone. A few years pass, and Willard sees the Ghost Ship pass close to him and turn away again, appearing to taunt him. He begins to lose track of time and guesses that as many as twenty years pass; he spends his days going through the motions of managing the ship as he feels himself aging physically. Then, he sees a ship approach, and this time it is a real ship. The ship sends out a rescue calls and retrieves Willard from the \u201cMary Lou.\u201d Willard spends the next few days reacquainting himself with human interaction and struggling with the horrible memories of his decades in solitude. Then, he starts to realize something is off about the crew of the ship that rescued him. They will not engage him in any conversation other than the operations of the ship. When Willard meets the captain later, he reveals he actually is on the Ghost Ship after all. It only appeared solid to Willard the more the \u201cMary Lou\u201d lost its mass and energy and itself became a kind of \u201cghost ship\u201d through its aimless wandering through space. Willard realizes he is dead and will never again return to Earth. "}
{"id": "62244_1", "pid": "62244_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Willard and Larry Dobbin are the lone space explorers aboard the Mary Lou, a ship that can\u2019t move due to meteor damage. As the story begins, WIllard tries to comfort Dobbin as Dobbin dies. Before passing away, Dobbin sees what he believes to be \u201cThe Ghost Ship\u201d, a fabled ship that comes for dying spacemen. Willard believes Ghost Ships are just fairy tales and that Dobbin was delirious. \n\nTwo years later, Willard sees what looks like a partially invisible rocket ship, though his ship\u2019s control board shows no sign of anything. As the ship turns away and disappears, Willard wonders if he imagined it or if it could be The Ghost Ship, but decides that is impossible. \n\nSeven more years go by, and we read a small article from Willard and Dobbin\u2019s hometown newspaper (that we are told Willard will never see), about the thirteenth anniversary of Willard and Dobbin embarking on their mission, how they have never been heard from again, and how Willard\u2019s son is having a large spaceship manufactured in his father\u2019s honor. \n\nBack on the Mary Lou, Willard can\u2019t help but dream of his Earth days each night. He grows more and more despondent and thinks about Ghost Ships. He stops looking out the window, and isn\u2019t sure if fifteen or twenty years have passed. He wonders if he has gone mad when he sees a ship coming. Everything changes when he realizes that it\u2019s a real ship that taps out a real message on his space-telegrapher.\n\nThe other ship invites him to come aboard and he gratefully accepts, boarding it and immediately falling asleep. Over the next few weeks he drifts in and out of consciousness, knowing that he must be being drugged but also realizing it would be difficult for him to acclimate to being around others so soon. His memories start to come back and his mind starts to clear, and he notices that none of the men caring for him want to give him any information or answer his questions. \n\nAfter Willard awakens fully, one of the men says he\u2019ll get the captain, who wanted to see Willard when he came to. The captain comes to see him, and Willard notices that he is very old. He tells the captain that he can\u2019t wait to get to Earth and asks when they\u2019ll go. The captain explains that after floating around in space for as long as they and Willard have, things and people lose their mass and energy. Willard hadn\u2019t yet lost his twenty years ago, which is why their ship didn\u2019t look fully formed to him then. Now that he has, he is just a shell like them and can see them fully. \n\nAs Willard puts the pieces together, the captain explains that they can\u2019t go to Earth because they would pass right through it. Willard realizes that this is, in fact, a Ghost Ship, and that they are the ghosts, and the captain confirms this. \n"}
{"id": "62244_2", "pid": "62244_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of memories in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Both Dobbin and Willard have memories of Earth that sadden them and make them lonely. As Dobbin is dying, he remembers his life on Earth, and his greatest regret is that he will never see it again. Dobbin is satisfied with his life and experiences, but his Earth-loneliness prevents him from dying a happy man. Willard is also pained by his memories of Earth and what he has lost and will never have again. Alone in space, Willard considers his memories the only things of value to him. Because his memories cause him so much pain, Willard tries to ignore them or remove them, but they return in his dreams. His memories in his dreams are full of sensory details and other details that he did not notice when he was on Earth. However, when Willard is drugged and sleeping on the Ghost Ship, his dreams are of memories from the years he spent on the Mary Lou, and his dreams about people that he knew are unpleasant. Willard believes that if he could walk on Earth one more time, he would die a happy man."}
{"id": "62244_2", "pid": "62244_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of memories in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Memories are both joys for Willard as well as his greatest anguish. The memories of his time on Earth, the sound of his friend\u2019s voices, the feel of the ground beneath his feet, and even the sounds of the buildings and the city torture him since it gives him something to hope for. \nHe is not able to let go of his life because he longs to survive and live out the rest of his days on Earth. He spends almost 20 years alone while in space, holding on to his memories to keep him going. Unlike Dobbin, memories became Willard\u2019s constant companion and the only thing that lasted with him throughout his time aboard the Mary Lou. \nIn the end, though, his memories basically haunted and tormented him. He would push them away, only to dream of them at night. His memories broke him and, without anyone beside him, Willard slowly faded away into nothing more than a shell of a man. \n"}
{"id": "62244_2", "pid": "62244_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of memories in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Memories function as a link to reality for Willard. The more he struggles to stay sane during his long periods of isolation, the more he relies on his vivid memories of Earth\u2014walking along the streets of Arden, hearing the voices of his co-workers and scientists he used to know, the voices of his friends and wife\u2013to keep him alive. Even as the \u201cMary Lou\u201d slowly begins to lose its energy and shape and become a \u201cghost ship\u201d, Willard is not aware that this process is even happening because his memories keep him grounded in a kind of reality. In this reality, his memories keep Willard alive because Willard believes he is alive and that a real ship has come to save him. The idea of returning to Earth and seeing those memories come to life again keeps Willard going for all those decades."}
{"id": "62244_2", "pid": "62244_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of memories in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Memories are very significant in the story, because they both sustain Willard\u2019s will to keep going and torment him when he is at his lowest points. He dreams of his Earth days at night and longs to hear the voices of his friends, family, and coworkers, and to see Earth again. When he is rescued by The Ghost Ship, he tells the Captain that the idea of seeing Earth is all that has kept him going. His Earth memories have also made him feel even lonelier as he has floated through space, and now on The Ghost Ship his memories of being stranded on the Mary Lou haunt him in his nightmares. His memories have alternately been a struggle and a lifeline, but are ultimately what have kept him connected to his humanity. \n"}
{"id": "62244_3", "pid": "62244_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Larry Dobbin, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21312, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Willard considers Larry Dobbin his best friend. They are both astronauts in a rocket ship that was on a voyage past Pluto to explore a possible planetoid. Their ship was struck by a meteor and can no longer fly, so they are drifting through space. When the story opens, Dobbin is dying. His breathing is erratic, and his fingertips are black. Dobbin has accepted his impending death, but Willard tries to convince Dobbin that he is not dying and that they will return to Earth. Dobbin longs to return to Earth and regrets that he will not see it again. He remembers his first space flight as Willard raises him to look out the port window at the stars. Before he dies, Dobbin declares that the Ghost Ship has come for him. He points to it out the window, but Willard does not see it. Willard believes that Dobbin has gone mad. Dobbin then dies. Dobbin is mentioned in a newspaper account thirteen years after the men left on their voyage when Willard\u2019s son builds a larger version of their ship called the Mary Lou II. The article indicates they were never heard from again. \n"}
{"id": "62244_3", "pid": "62244_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Larry Dobbin, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21312, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Larry Dobbin is John Willard\u2019s right-hand man abroad the space ship Mary Lou. They blasted off from Rocket Port nine years before the beginning of the story. They went to space to explore the possibility of another planetoid hidden beyond Pluto. \nLarry Dobbin, as Willard\u2019s companion and confidante, operated the Mary Lou from the control board, possibly co-piloting with Willard. \nHowever, less than five years into their adventure, the Mary Lou was struck by a meteor, which damaged the Mary Lou to no repair but only in certain areas. The meteor did not damage the assimilators and convertors, which meant the ship was livable, but not moveable. However, assumedly during the meteor strike, Dobbin was severely injured. At the beginning of the story, he is dying and sees a ship far in the distance. He claims it\u2019s the ghost ship coming to take him away. After spotting the ship, Dobbin quickly passes. Willard mourns respectfully and follows the vigil ritual. Two days later, Willard disposed of Dobbin\u2019s body, and his atoms were converted into pure energy for the Mary Lou. "}
{"id": "62244_3", "pid": "62244_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Larry Dobbin, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21312, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Larry Dobbin is Willard\u2019s closest friend and fellow explorer who joins Willard on the \u201cMary Lou.\u201d Their mission is to journey to a small planet that lies beyond Pluto. At some point in their expedition, a meteor hits their ship and damages it, causing the \u201cMary Lou\u201d to drift through unknown space, unable to return to Earth. Dobbin becomes sick during this period, and Willard realizes he is going to die. Dobbin hopes to return to Earth prior to his death, and Willard entertains this fantasy in order to give him some hope and peace before his passing. Dobbin remembers his first journey into space, and as he peers out into the abyss towards the end of his life, he exclaims that he sees the Ghost Ship\u2014a legend amongst sailors and spacemen who claim people see such a ship in the moments before death. Dobbin dies shortly after announcing his vision, and Willard is left alone."}
{"id": "62244_3", "pid": "62244_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Larry Dobbin, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21312, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Larry Dobbin (called \u201cHarry Dobbin\u201d by Willard) is the other space explorer on the Mary Lou with Willard. They embarked on a voyage to explore a planetoid beyond Pluto, and were never heard from on Earth again. As the story begins, they are four years into the mission and Dobbin is dying of an unspecified illness that has turned his finger tips black and made it difficult for him to breathe or speak. Willard lifts him to the window of the ship so he can see the stars one last time, and Dobbin says he sees The Ghost Ship and that it has come for him because he is dying. Willard assures him that isn\u2019t the case as Dobbin passes away. Willard keeps vigil over Dobbin\u2019s remains for two days before disposing of them in the ship\u2019s engine. \n"}
{"id": "62244_4", "pid": "62244_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Ghost Ships in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There are legends and tall tales about the Ghost Ships, told mainly by drunken men and professional storytellers. Willard remembers that there are stories on Earth about Ghost Ships that sail the Seven Seas. The story goes that the crews of Ghost Ships have broken a particular law, and their punishment is to roam forever. The Ghost Ship in space is said to be the home of spacemen who could not return to Earth. When Dobbin is dying, he claims to see the Ghost Ship and that it has come for him, but when Willard looks for the ship, he does not see it. Later, when Willard sees the Ghost Ship for himself for the first time, he tries to convince himself it is not really there. He remembers the stories about oceangoing Ghost Ships and reasons that there could also be Ghost Ships in space. When the Ghost Ship turns to leave, Willard is almost sorry to see it go because he has been so lonely. When the Ghost Ship appears to Willard for the second time, it has pulled alongside the Mary Lou, and Willard thinks it is a real ship. Only when the Ghost Ship abruptly speeds away and Willard sees stars shining through it does Willard realize it was the Ghost Ship, and he believes it is mocking him. With his third sighting of the Ghost Ship, Willard immediately thinks it is the Ghost Ship but then convinces himself it is not when it messages him. After he is on the ship, he realizes it is indeed the Ghost Ship and that he is now a Ghost. \n"}
{"id": "62244_4", "pid": "62244_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Ghost Ships in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Ghost Ship is a tale told by spacemen to frighten each other or warn them of this grave possibility. Many of those that came close to death in space, or those who witnessed others dying with no hope of a return to earth, mentioned seeing a ghost ship. A faint outline of a ship that had come to take them away forever. Before Dobbin\u2019s death at the story of the story, he tells Willard that he sees the ghost ship. \nThis ghost ship serves as another form of torture for Willard during his many years of solitude. The ghost ship would essentially check up on him, float by and see if he was still alive or not. This gave Willard false hope as he would dream that the ghost ship was a real rocket ship that was coming to rescue him. In the end, Willard is taken away by a ghost ship, though he thinks it\u2019s a rescue ship initially, and he is doomed to forever fly through the solar system as a ghost and nothing more. There is no hope for his return to Earth. The men of the ghost ship are truly ghosts, invisible to the naked eye and only visible to those on their deathbeds. \n"}
{"id": "62244_4", "pid": "62244_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Ghost Ships in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Ghost Ship is a legend that sailors and space travelers alike have claimed people see in the moments before they die at sea or in space. In the seconds before Dobbin dies in Willard\u2019s arms, he looks out the window of the \u201cMary Lou\u201d and claims to see the Ghost Ship himself. Throughout Willard\u2019s long periods of solitude aboard the \u201cMary Lou\u201d, he thinks he sees the Ghost Ship several times. First, from a distance, as a blinking light advancing closer and closer before turning back and sailing off into dark space; later, he thinks he sees the ship return, only this time it passes nearer before turning back and leaving again. With each return of the Ghost Ship, Willard believes he sees it clearer than he had before. After decades adrift in space, Willard believes a ship has finally come to rescue him. He does not think it is the Ghost Ship because it is solid, and he is greeted by a crew of people. However, the captain explains that the longer a vessel spends lost in space, the more it loses itself and slips into a kind of un-reality, along with those aboard. The more the \u201cMary Lou\u201d drifted into this space, the more real the Ghost Ship became to Willard. Willard realizes that the \u201cMary Lou\u201d has become a \u201cghost ship\u201d herself."}
{"id": "62244_4", "pid": "62244_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Ghost Ships in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ghost Ships frame the story and the idea of them haunts Willard on and off throughout it. At the beginning, when Dobbin exclaims that he sees a Ghost Ship prior to his death, Willard tells himself that it was a hallucination from somewhere deep in his dying friend\u2019s subconscious, just the result of the memory of an old legend. However, the idea of a Ghost Ship never really leaves Willard\u2019s mind throughout the rest of the story. When he sees a partially transparent rocket ship that turns away and disappears, he wonders if it could be a Ghost Ship but talks himself out of it. Later he wonders if it was a ghost ship that was \u201cmocking him\u201d. When he is rescued by a ship that looks more real, the thought still crosses his mind that it could be a Ghost Ship and he again shuts the idea down. Ultimately, Ghost Ships are incredibly significant in the story, because it turns out that both the Mary Lou, and his rescue ship/new home, while not exactly like the tall tale, are, in effect, Ghost Ships. \n"}
{"id": "62244_5", "pid": "62244_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21319, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Larry Dobbin and John Willard are astronauts together in space on a mission to explore a planetoid beyond Pluto. When a meteor damages their rocket, they both realize they will never return to Earth. Willard considers Dobbin the best friend he has ever had friend, and when Dobbin is dying, Willard tries to keep his spirits up by telling him that he has a new plan for a way for them to return to Earth. When Dobbin wants to see the stars one last time before he dies, Willard raises him so that he can see them out the port window. When Dobbins sees the Ghost Ship and says that it has come for him, Willard assures him that nothing is there. After Dobbin dies, Willard holds a wake for him for two days before he recycles Dobbin\u2019s body because the ship can still break down waste and refuse to create food and air. Afterward, Willard regrets disposing of Dobbin\u2019s body. With Dobbin gone, Willard experiences great pain and loneliness. Eventually, Willard sees the Ghost Ship and knows that his friend was right about it."}
{"id": "62244_5", "pid": "62244_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21319, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dobbin and Willard are close friends, companions, and colleagues. As they co-pilot and run the Mary Lou together in outer space, their relationship continued to develop. Willard even said that Dobbin was his sole friend in space. Being the only two people on board the Mary Lou brought them closer together and helped their relationship evolve. \nAlthough the reader does not see them together much, the effects of Dobbin on Willard are very evident and show how close the two of them were. Willard watched over his body for two Earth days before respectfully disposing of it. This dedication to his brethren shows how close the two of them became. \n"}
{"id": "62244_5", "pid": "62244_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21319, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Willard and Larry Dobbin are both spacemen piloting the \u201cMary Lou\u201d on a mission to explore a small planet far away from Earth, past Pluto. Due to their isolation and sheer amount of time spent together, they become close friends. In fact, they are the only friends each other has ever had in outer space. Following the meteor strike that disables their ship, Willard understands Dobbin\u2019s desire to return to Earth as well as the importance of having hope that such a return would one day be possible. Willard offers Dobbin support in his dying moments, holding him up so he can see out the window. This is when Dobbin sees the Ghost Ship right before passing away. Dobbin\u2019s vision would influence Willard\u2019s struggle between belief and disbelief throughout the remainder of his time in space."}
{"id": "62244_5", "pid": "62244_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nGALACTIC GHOST\n \n\n By WALTER KUBILIUS\n \n \n The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom\u2014and lived.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.\n \n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n \n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n \n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once more!\"\n \n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.\n \n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.\n \n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.\n \n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.\n \n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n \n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n \n \"Saw what?\"\n \n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n \n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is it?\"\n \n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.\n \n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n \n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.\n \n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n \n \"It's come\u2014for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n \n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .\n \n \n\n \n The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n \n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.\n \n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n \n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.\n \n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .\n \n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.\n \n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n \n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?\n \n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n \n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.\n \n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \" It's come\u2014for me! \" but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas\u2014ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n \n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n \n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.\n \n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:\n \n \" Arden, Rocketport \u2014Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father.\"\n \n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.\n \n Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.\n \n And so it was that each night\u2014for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time\u2014Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.\n \n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.\n \n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.\n \n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.\n \n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:\n \n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk\u2014the Ghost will come\u2014for you!\n \n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n \n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n \n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n \n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\n \n \n\n \n Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.\n \n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.\n \n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.\n \n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n \n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.\n \n \n\n \n For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n \n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n \n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n \n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.\n \n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n \n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n \n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND\u2014ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?\"\n \n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n \n \"YES! COMING!\"\n \n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n \n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n \n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.\n \n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n \n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n \n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\n \n \n\n \n He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.\n \n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n \n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.\n \n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.\n \n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\n \n \n\n \n He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.\n \n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know when you came to.\"\n \n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.\n \n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next\u2014for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.\n \n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n \n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.\n \n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n \n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n\"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou .\"\n \n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.\n \n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly, measuring each word. \"Years in space\u2014all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n \n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n \n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!\"\n \n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.\n \n \"I want to walk on Earth just once\u2014then I can die.\"\n \n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n \n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n \n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.\n \n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n \n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .\n \n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real\u2014to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years\u2014to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n \n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on it...\"\n \n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!\"\n \n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....\n \n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 21255, "query_start_index": 21257, "query_end_index": 21319, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dobbin and Willard are the two space explorers aboard the Mary Lou, a ship bound to explore past Pluto. At the beginning of the story, Willard describes Dobbin as his only friend in space, and the best friend he ever had. The loss of Dobbin sends Willard into a spiral of loneliness and depression that lasts decades, as Dobbin was his only companion and connection to Earth. Dobbin only survives the first few paragraphs of the story, but he continues to have an influence on his colleague and friend. Dobbin believed he saw The Ghost Ship before he died, and the idea of that sticks with Willard throughout the rest of his journey aboard the Mary Lou and beyond, despite his skepticism. \n"}
{"id": "61198_1", "pid": "61198_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "As the story opens, Ambassador Magnan briefs Councillor Retief on the Terrestrial Embassy\u2019s request for sponsorship of youth groups on the planet Fust.  Councillor Retief is not interested. Magnan specifically suggests that Retief sponsor the group SCARS (Sexual, Cultural and Athletic Recreational Society), and warns Retief that the rival Groaci may fill any void. Retief suggests researching the youth groups before giving them money. Magnan is dismissive. Retief is still not interested, and leaves to go look at plans for a new passenger liner being built by the Fustians. \nRetief takes a flat-car to the ship yard and meets Whonk, who is a shipyard clerk. He asks to see the blueprints, which he photographs. He and Whonk chat about the attitude of the youth, and Whonk blames it on their new leader, Slock, who hangs around with Yith, a member of the Groaci embassy.\nLater, while Retief is on his way home to dress for a dinner and press event organized by Magnan, two Fustian youths threaten him on the bus. Retief realizes that they were after his photos, which showed that the ship under construction was a battle cruiser, not a passenger liner. He also realizes that Whonk may be in danger. Retief escapes the youths and races back to the shipyard to find that Whonk has been dragged off and tied up in a warehouse. From the Fustian\u2019s wounds, Retief realized that they had tried to kill him.\nRetief figures out that the Fustian youths have taken some titanite, an explosive, over to a ship called the Moss Rock, which would be full of dignitaries later. He and Whonk race over there and encounter more Fustians, and win a fight with them, effectively breaking up the Groaci-backed plot to blow up the ship. \nRetief arrives at the banquet a little late, and exchanges a few words with Magnan, who proceeds to make the Fustians miserable with his cultural insensitivity. A few minutes later, the SCARS leader, Slock, arrives. Retief reveals Slock\u2019s plan: Slock, backed by the Groaci, was planning to take over Fust. The Groaci tried to frame the Terrestrial Embassy for the plot.\nSlock escaped. Retief went back toward the Moss Rock, where Whonk tackled Slock, and Retief accosted Yith. Whonk wanted to take revenge on Yith for attacking him earlier, but Retief instead negotiated a deal in which Yith, who had mastered removing the Fustian carapace surgically, which would be a great relief to Whonk and other elders, would agree to do so in return for not being ritually dismembered. Just as this agreement was completed, Slock tried to escape again, but Whonk dumped him on the Moss Rock, and set the autopilot for Groaci, still full of titanite. It blew up on the way there.\nMagnan wrested what he could, diplomatically speaking, from the wreckage of the youth sponsorship program and moved on to plans to sponsor Senior Citizens Groups.\n"}
{"id": "61198_1", "pid": "61198_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows Retief, a Terrestrial diplomat working on the surface of the Fustian planet, where these two species co-exist with the Groaci. At the start of the story, Retief is talking to the Terrestrial Ambassador about a new program that the Fustians are looking for sponsorship for, that the Ambassador wants Retief to take care of. Retief, the Councillor, does not seem interested, and heads out to the shipyards to ask the people there some questions about a new ship being built. An older Fustian named Whonk allows him to see the plans for the ship and tells Retief about Slock, one of the local leaders of the Youths that seems to be a bad influence. These troublesome characters showed up to talk to Whonk and scare Retief off of the docks as Retief slips out unnoticed. He finds plans in the Embassy's library for an old battle cruiser that match the plans for the new ship, pointing him towards a plot to re-introduce weapons into the society. He finds Whonk, injured from the others' attempt to extract information from him, and the two of them piece together the clues: there was titanite, a dangerous explosive, that is going to be placed on the fanciest boat at the docks, the Moss Rock. When they get to that ship to take a look, they find a variety of items emblazoned with the logo of SCARS, the Youth Group that Ambassador Magnan wanted Retief to sponsor at the beginning. Retief figures that these items are here as planted false evidence, so that the explosion would be pinned on the Youth Group, and thus the Terrestrials by extension. Retief's goal is to destroy this plot--Whonk captures a Fustian who they realize has had his shell surgically removed, something that they thought impossible. Retief takes this to mean that the Groaci have more medical knowledge than they realized, and that they are responsible for this plot. In order to expose this plan, he heads to the banquet where the sponsorship of the Youth Group is being announced. He interrupts the Ambassador's grand announcement, exposing the plot to the press that was already gathered there. He knew Slock to be a gang leader, told everyone of the plan to blow up the Moss Rock and his deal with the Groaci, and then runs toward the boat with Whonk and the Ambassador. Whonk wanted to follow through with his society's classic ceremonial revenge against Yith, the Groaci at the ship, but Retief convinces them to have a sort of trade: Yith would share the medical knowledge to remove Whonk's heavy outer shell so that it would no longer be a nuisance and a heavyweight, and Slock is thrown onto the Moss Rock as it leaves the docks and explodes. With the plot exposed, the Ambassador wants to move on to more social projects, but Retief heads out for a fishing vacation with his new friend Whonk."}
{"id": "61198_1", "pid": "61198_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with a meeting between Ambassador Magnan and Councillor Retief, who represents the Terrestrial Embassy on the planet Fust. The planet is populated with turtle-like creatures called Fustians (the younger Fustians lack the hard shell of the mature ones). Magnan assigns Retief the mission of sponsoring a new youth movement there called the Sexual, Cultural, Athletic Recreational Society (SCARS). Instead, Retief prefers to investigate a new passenger ship being built by the Fustians. Upon his arrival at the shipyard, Retief meets Whonk, an elderly Fustian who maintains documents, and he shows Retief the blueprints for the new ship. A young Fustian named Slock enters and arouses Retief\u2019s suspicions by inquiring what he wants with the plans. After he leaves the shipyard, Retief is attacked by two young Fustians, and he returns to find Whonk has been attacked as well. Retief notices a stain on the ground that Whonk tells him is a remnant of four drums belonging to the Groaci\u2014an alien species that operated a competing embassy. Retief had seen interacting a Groaci attache interacting with the youth that had attacked him earlier. The drums had been loaded onto a boat called \"Moss Rock.\" After identifying the smelly stain as an explosive called titanite, Retief and Whonk go to \"Moss Rock\" and discover a box containing a SCARS uniform. While there, they are attacked by an older-looking youth Fustian and discover that he is not a youth at all; rather, his shell has been removed by some mysterious method. They ward off another attack by his friends, and Retief decides to head to the sponsorship ceremony, realizing that the Groaci are likely taking advantage of the SCARS group's distaste for Fustian leadership to advance their plot to bomb \"Moss Rock\". At the sponsorship ceremony, Ambassador Magnan introduces Slock as guest of honor, and Retief and Whonk seize the opportunity to apprehend him and explain his deal with the Groaci to the press: The Groaci would supply weapons, and Slock would make sure they were installed on the ship. The SCARS uniforms found at the scene of the exploded ship would implicate them along with the Terrestrial Embassy, because of its sponsorship of SCARS. Magnan notes that Slock was scheduled to be on the ship, and Retief rebuts that this reveals the Groaci's intention to get rid of Slock after he'd done their bidding. Thus, the disaster at \"Moss Rock\" would cement the Groaci's control of Fust. Retief returns to the \"Moss Rock\" and captures the Groaci diplomat Yith, and Whonk captures Slock, whom they both discover has also had his shell surgically removed to appear younger. Retief makes a deal with Whonk to spare Yith's life in exchange for the same shell-removal surgery. Whonk takes his revenge on Slock by placing him back on the \"Moss Rock\" and exploding the ship with the titanite barrels on its course to Groaci. Retief informs Magnan that this display will prevent the Groaci from pursuing any further action against Fust."}
{"id": "61198_1", "pid": "61198_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ambassador Magnan wants Retief, the Councillor working with him at the Terrestrial Embassy, to sponsor the Fustian youth group the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society (SCARS), but Retief isn\u2019t interested. Instead, he wants to check out the new passenger liner that the Fustians are building, but he does express concern about the Groaci\u2019s interest in Fust, which has a steel-age manufacturing economy while Groaci is into crude atomics. At the shipyards, an old Fustian named Whonk shows him the blueprints for the new passenger liner. Retief takes photographs of the blueprints to study them later. Slock, a young Fustian, comes with a Groaci Embassy military attache and beats up on Whonk while Retief sneaks out the back.\n\nLater in the day, Retief has to attend a dinner where the sponsor for the SCARS youth group will be announced. On the way, he is accosted by two Fustain youth who tell him they want the films for the pictures he took of the blueprints. Retief manages to elude them. He has looked at pictures and realized they are plans for a replica of a battlecruiser used two hundred years ago and has gun placements. Retief realizes that Whonk must have told them about his pictures and knows that he wouldn\u2019t tell them willingly, so he goes to Whonk\u2019s office to look for him. He sees signs of a struggle and finds Whonk tied up behind some bales where he is out of sight. Whonk reveals he was attacked by a Groaci, Slock, and his cohorts, and they tried to kill him. Retief recognizes the smell of an explosive, and Whonk tells him drums of it have been placed on a barge called Moss Rock. \n\nRetief and Whonk decide to go back to the Embassy but are attacked by one of the young Fustians who attacked Whonk earlier that day. As they wrestle with him, they pull off his cloak to discover that his carapace has been removed, so he isn\u2019t really a youth. Whonk is stunned because he believed it wasn\u2019t possible to remove a carapace without killing the Fustian. \n\nAt the dinner, Magnan announces that Retief has won the \u201cbidding\u201d to sponsor the SCARS. Retief sneaks up on Slock and tells Magnan that he has figured out that the Groaci are planning to take over a local world and then branch out to more worlds. They have been using the young Fustians to help them set up their attack but planned to kill them after everything was ready. Retief catches a Groaci, and Whonk wants to kill him, but Retief gets him to promise to have the Groaci surgeon remove the carapaces from the older Fustians like Whonk. When Retief reports the scheme to Magnan, he tells his superior that the Moss Rock is headed for Groaci and will explode there, ending their problems with the Groaci.\n"}
{"id": "61198_2", "pid": "61198_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nSummarize the Fustian life cycle and culture.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28890, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fustians somewhat resemble gigantic, intelligent snapping turtles, and like turtles, start life as eggs. During their youth and adolescence, they are relatively agile and have no shells (unlike turtles). It is notable how many Fustian elders take a dim view of adolescents, with the Minister of Fust himself saying that the Youth should be \u201ckept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\u201d\nWhen Fustians mature, they develop an enormous, horny carapace which they are obliged to carry around on their backs for the rest of their lives, which last over a thousand years. The carapaces cause the adult Fustians to be slow-moving, and they take up a lot of space \u2013 hence their public transportation consists of flat-cars instead of buses with seats. Unfortunately, not much is known by off-worlders of Fustian females.\nLike most intelligent races, Fustians enjoy music. The frequencies at which their music is played are subsonic, and therefore not audible to the human ear. Likewise, their ears are quite sensitive to high frequencies, such as those produced by tapping on a crystal glass with a spoon. This is not just unpleasant, but painful to Fustian ears.\n"}
{"id": "61198_2", "pid": "61198_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nSummarize the Fustian life cycle and culture.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28890, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fustians are similar to tortoises in build, with yellow eyes, scales, and very thick hides that leak purple blood when cut. They have a much longer life-cycle than humans, as those that are 75 years of age are still considered to be teenagers or even youths. \n\nAs Faustians age, they grow larger, their voices get deeper, and they eventually acquire very heavy shells. It is past their current medical knowledge to safely remove the shells, though we find out at the end of the story that the Groaci have discovered a technique that allows them to do this. This is important because the shells slow the older Fustians down and are often considered a nuisance. When they are young, they are very secretive, and wary of strangers from other groups and species. The older Fustians do not seem to mind the humans (and aliens in general) as much, and sometimes apologize for the behavior of the younger ones. It seems that they wish they could do more to control their behavior, but the younger ones are physically much faster and can escape attempts at control. It also seems to be the case that this difference in behavior is more acute now than it has been in the past, perhaps due to social pressures from other groups. \n\nSleep is very important to them, and regular greetings in day-to-day life include well wishes for a long rest, as well as specific types of dreams. When they are angry or want to insult someone, they wish nightmares upon them. They have regular siesta times during the work day. Sleep is so important to them that they have a National Dirge called the Lament of Hatching. Ceremonial revenge is also important to them: although the older Fustians are not necessarily quick to anger, they follow through once they have been wronged. "}
{"id": "61198_2", "pid": "61198_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nSummarize the Fustian life cycle and culture.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28890, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fustians are a species turtle-like in their appearance. They have very long lives; in fact, the average age of a Fustian youth is seventy-five years old. As they age, they develop a hard-shell on their backs, which is quite heavy and hard. This causes them to move slower as they get older. The younger Fustians can move quite fast in comparison. However, the older Fustians appear to be a great deal stronger and can hold their own in combat, as demonstrated by Whonk when he defends himself against Slock\u2019s cronies and eventually captures Slock. The elderly Fustians also grow thicker skin, which is what ultimately prevents Whonk from being decapitated when he is first attacked. Fustians have turtle-like mouths that snap when they are angry. Steel manufacturing fuels their economy. While older Fustians are generally hospitable and patient, the younger Fustians have become frustrated with the ways of the elderly Fustian leadership, and their drive to change things blinds them to being manipulated by the Groaci. Although weapons are illegal on Fust, the younger Fustians seem willing to break this rule by accepting weapons from the Groaci in exchange for their knowledge of the ships."}
{"id": "61198_2", "pid": "61198_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nSummarize the Fustian life cycle and culture.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28890, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Fustians look like turtles and have extremely long lifespans. Younger Fustians do not have a carapace, but older ones do, which can be quite heavy. Seventy-five-year-olds are considered youths, like teenagers, because they can live for about two thousand years. The 75-year-olds have a reputation as being at a trying age. As Whonk explains to Retief, the youth have a reputation for \u201cshame\u201d and \u201cdiscourtesy.\u201d The Elders feel that there is little they can do about the youths' misbehavior since the Elders are so much slower with their carapaces. They have no police and have never needed them until the youth became so unruly. They have a youth group, the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society (SCARS), that needs a sponsor and wants someone to provide them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment, and so forth. The Fustians\u2019 dwellings have a fishy odor and are found along a broad cobbled street. They have a caste system; the driver of a flat car is a member of the labor caste. Their greetings relate to peaceful sleep: \u201cLong-may-you-sleep\u201d and \u201cMay-you-dream-of-the-deeps.\u201d Likewise, their insults related to unpleasant sleep: \u201cMay you toss in nightmares!\u201d The oldest Fustians are forced into retirement and given once-daily feedings; Whonk says this is nothing to look forward to for his next thousand years. They have a strong sense of right and wrong and carry out ceremonial revenge when wronged."}
{"id": "61198_3", "pid": "61198_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Magnan, and what is his role in and relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28911, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Magnan is the Ambassador to Fust, and thus is Retief\u2019s boss. He is also a spineless, political wind-sniffing clod. His main role, or function in the story is as a foil to the hero, Retief. Magnan\u2019s clueless blathering sets up Retief\u2019s dry, sarcastic remarks \u2013 remarks which, if Magnan were not so oblivious, would perhaps offend Magnan to the point of firing Retief. \nWhile Retief is running around Fust getting into fist fights and spoiling terrorists\u2019 plots, Magnan is back at the office shuffling whatever papers came in from the Terrestrial Embassy that day, implementing the \u201cprogram of the week.\u201d Magnan is flat. Retief is three-dimensional.\nMagnan\u2019s main contributions to the story are to: \n1.\tIgnore Retief\u2019s advice to check out the Fustian youth organizations before sponsoring them, which leads to the potential for the Terrestrial Embassy being embarrassed by the Groaci attempts to frame SCARS for the explosion they hoped to cause aboard the Moss Rock. \n2.\tSet up the banquet to honor SCARS where he grossly insults his Fustian counterparts by having the hired musicians play a dirge, the \u201cLament of Hatching,\u201d and then shattering their ear drums by tapping on his wine glass.\n3.\tWhip up a meringue of obfuscation to hide the fiasco of the youth organization sponsorship program and try to make himself smell like a rose in the process\n4.\tStart a new sponsorship program for Fustian Senior Citizens.\nAt no point in the story does he do anything useful at all.\n"}
{"id": "61198_3", "pid": "61198_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Magnan, and what is his role in and relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28911, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Magnan is the Terrestrial Ambassador to the Fustians. He is the figurehead of their influence on the Fustian planet, and works closely with Retief, the Terrestrial diplomat who uncovers a plot against the Terrestrials through the course of the story. He is the man who tries to convince Retief to sponsor the Youth Group SCARS in the beginning of the story, and we encounter him at the banquet near the end of the story. As the figurehead, he is responsible for announcing the role of the Terrestrials in funding the Youth Group, which creates an opportunity for Retief to announce the Grocian plot to everyone. Ambassador Magnan eventually joins Retief and Whonk as they leave the event to stop the criminals, but he is thrown into an alley by Whonk and doesn't have an opportunity to help directly. After the issue is dealt with by Whonk and Retief, Magnan resumes normal duty, and as the story ends he is looking at other groups that his government could potentially fund.\n"}
{"id": "61198_3", "pid": "61198_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Magnan, and what is his role in and relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28911, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Magnan is an ambassador with the Terrestrial Embassy, and he assigns Retief the mission to sponsor the new youth movement (SCARS) on the planet Fust. Magnan seems eager for this sponsorship to proceed despite his general ignorance about the movement itself. His motivation for speed rather than understanding may be attributed to the haste with which the Groaci Embassy has moved to establish a connection with SCARS. Magnan, of course, is not aware of the secret dealings between the Groaci and the SCARS, whom they are working with to ultimately supplant the Fustian leadership and take control of the planet for themselves. Magnan\u2019s vision is fairly straightforward and views this sponsorship as the surest way to curry good favor with the Fustians (and get good publicity for the Terrestrial Embassy). Magnan is impatient with Retief\u2019s more meticulous, fact-finding methods and organizes the sponsorship ceremony before Retief has completed his research. At the ceremony, Magnan\u2019s interactions with the Fustian minister reveal further his humorous ignorance about their species, particularly when he hurts their sensitive hearing by banging his glass louder and louder. After he invites Slock on stage to present him to the press as his guest of honor and representative of SCARS, Whonk and Retief capture Slock and expose his plan to Magnan. At first, Magnan does not believe them, but he is quickly convinced when Slock escapes. In the end, Magnan creates a story for the press that the sponsorship event was a ruse to apprehend the perpetrators of the attempted coup against the Fustian leadership. "}
{"id": "61198_3", "pid": "61198_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Magnan, and what is his role in and relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28911, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Magnan is the Ambassador at the Terrestrial Embassy on Fust and Councillor Retief\u2019s boss. He wants Retief to sponsor the SCARS and stops just short of ordering him to do so. Magnan is very focused on his role as Ambassador and has little interest in anything not directly connected to his job. Magnan is not concerned about the passenger ship the Fustians are building or the fact that the Groacis are interested in the Fustians when their lives and economies are so different from each other. When Retief mentions the fact that the Groacis are interested in fission bombs, Magnan\u2019s reaction is to wonder what market there could be for such devices since the world is at peace. He is politically correct and is shocked when Retief mentions the carapaces that the older Fustians has. He also pretends that he can hear the Fustians\u2019 music when he clearly isn\u2019t able to do so. Magnan is manipulative because he announces that Retief will sponsor SCARS even after Retief clearly tells him he is not interested. He misjudges character and refers to Slock as a fine young fellow when Slock is rude, violent, and mixed up in the scheme with the Groacis to begin conquering nearby worlds. At the end of the story when Magnan finally learns of the deceit of the young Fustians and the Groacis, he tries to act like he knew about it all along. His disinterest in anything not related to diplomacy gives Retief the leeway he needs to figure out the Fustian and Groaci crimes."}
{"id": "61198_4", "pid": "61198_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Whonk, and what is his relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28898, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Whonk is a very old Fustian who works as a clerk at the shipyards. He meets Retief when Retief comes to to inquire about seeing plans for the new passenger liner. Whonk is neutral and correct, but not especially friendly. His partnership, and it seems fair to say, friendship with Retief really begins when Retief returns to the shipyard to look for Whonk and finds that the Fustian thugs who tried and failed to kill him, due to his thick, mature skin and shell, have left him tied up, in an undignified position on his back.\nRetief apologizes for putting him in danger, and gets the old Fustian back on his feet. Whonk is so grateful that he tells Retief, \u201cMy cows are yours,\u201d a heartfelt, traditional Fustian expression of gratitude. \nWhonk is extremely angry about what the Fustian Slock and his gang have done to him, and throws in his lot with Retief. Thereafter, every time Retief is in physical danger from Fustians, Whonk is right there to help. \nAt the end of the story, Whonk steps in again to help Retief capture Yith, a member of the Groaci diplomatic mission, and Slock the rebel adult Fustian with no carapace. His desire for vengeance against these two nearly overwhelms his good sense. He puts Slock on the Moss Rose with the titanite that Slock had intended to use against Fustian politicians, and sets the rocket to blast off to Groaci, knowing that it would below up before it got there. \nBut Retief manages to settle him down enough not to take Yith apart piece by piece, by getting the Groaci to do something that would make Whonk\u2019s life a lot easier and more pleasant: surgically remove his carapace. \nWhonk is steadfast, reliable, implacable \u2013 a good sidekick for Retief.\n"}
{"id": "61198_4", "pid": "61198_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Whonk, and what is his relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28898, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Whonk is the older Fustian who helps Retief uncover the Groacian plot. He is looking after papers when Retief asks to see the plans of the new ship being built, but is hurt by the gang members and Youths that come in after Retief leaves. He is still willing to help Retief after this, and the two of them work together to piece together their evidence. Being older means that Whonk has a very heavy shell that keeps him from moving quickly, but he is very strong--he manages to capture a number of characters throughout the story to keep them from running away. Not only is Whonk the reason Retief was able to confirm that the new ship was indeed meant to be a battle cruiser, helping to uncover the plot, but the two of them become friends and go on a fishing trip together at the end of the story."}
{"id": "61198_4", "pid": "61198_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Whonk, and what is his relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28898, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Whonk is an elderly Fustian who works managing documents at the shipyard where Retief goes to investigate the new passenger ship being built there. Whonk shares the documents with Retief, who notices its similarities to a defunct ship design that had been previously used in combat. Whonk educates Retief on the rebellious ways of the younger Fustians before they witness a Groaci military attache consulting with some youth outside his office. The youth attack Whonk after Retief\u2019s departure, nearly severing his head. When Retief returns to help him, Whonk is very grateful and continues to help Retief on his mission to discover the real connection between the Groaci and SCARS. Whonk guides Retief to the \u201cMoss Rock\u201d and helps Retief defeat yet another group of attacking youth. Whonk discovers that one of the youths is not a youth at all but rather an older Fustian with a detached shell. He is baffled by this. After a fracas at the sponsorship ceremony, Retief captures the Groaci attach\u00e9, and Whonk apprehends Slock, whom he quickly discovers is also an older Fustian with a surgically-removed shell. Retief convinces Whonk to forego his act of vengeance on the Groaci, and in exchange the Groaci would provide the elders of Fust with the same surgical procedure provided to the SCARS members. Pleased with this arrangement, Whonk agrees, but he is still seeking vengeance. He places Slock aboard the \u201cMoss Rock\u201d and sends it on a path to Groaci. The ship explodes on the way, killing Slock, and sending a message to the Groaci to stay away from Fust."}
{"id": "61198_4", "pid": "61198_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Whonk, and what is his relevance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28898, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Whonk is an older Fustian who is very polite and helpful to Retief. He lets Retief look at the blueprints for the passenger ship that the younger Fustians are building with the Groacis and then apologizes for the rudeness of the younger Fustian who confronts Retief for looking at the plans. Whonk becomes Retief\u2019s ally right away; he holds off the younger Fustians who come back to confront Retief, giving Retief a chance to sneak out the back door. After two younger Fustians tell Retief they want his films from his pictures of the plans, he realizes they must have gotten the information about the pictures from Whonk and knew Whonk wouldn\u2019t have given it to them freely. When he checks on Whonk, he finds him tied up. The younger Fustians had tried to kill him. From then on, the two work together, checking the Moss Rock for explosives that have been removed from the storage area. When attackers come, Whonk protects Retief and blocks the attackers with his carapace. Whonk provides Retief with information that he needs to determine who is involved in criminal activity and what that criminal activity is. At the end of the story, he provides justice for Slock by putting him aboard the Moss Rock before it blows up so that he gets his just rewards. When everything settles, Whonk offers to take Retief on a fishing vacation."}
{"id": "61198_5", "pid": "61198_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting for this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28880, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set entirely on the planet Fust. The native inhabitants of Fust are described as something similar to snapping turtles that walk on their hind legs, and much of the imagery used by Fustians when speaking revolves around themes of the sea and mud. Fust is a peaceful enough world that they don\u2019t even really have much of a police force, despite the rowdy and rebellious behavior of Fustian youths. \nNot much is known about the physical characteristics of the planet, such as the proportion of sea and dry land. We know there must be oceans, because the warehouse where Wonk was tied up and left was full of bales of kelp, a sea product. The city of the story is also near a sea, whose breezes make it a bit cool at certain times of day.\nThe city where all the action takes place is an important city, perhaps the capitol. It is full of diplomatic missions from all planets, and is apparently a place of some Fustian learning and culture, given that it has musicians for hire. There is a space ship building operation right outside the city, which can be reached by public transport that consists of flat open wagons. This is practical for the unwieldy shape of the adult Fustian, if not too comfortable for a human.\nOne of the most interesting things about Fust, and the hardest for an outsider to understand, is their assorted suns and moons. Fust is lit by a blue sun called Alpha and a yellow sun known as Beta, and three moons orbit Fust. There is also a third sun, unnamed, so that there are three \u201cnoons\u201d on Fust.\n"}
{"id": "61198_5", "pid": "61198_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting for this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28880, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on the planet whose native species is a turtle-like race known as the Fustians. It is usually a peaceful planet, and does not have a police force like humans are used to--in fact, weapons are currently illegal. There are at least two other species living here as well: the Terrestrials and the Groaci. More specifically, the story takes place near the coastline, with many events taking place either in political buildings or at the docks. The sea that lines this area has strong tides controlled by a number of celestial objects: there are three moons and multiple sons. The major sun is referred to as Beta, and is yellow, but there is a blue sun called Alpha as well. This has strong impacts on the weather as well: it can be very chilly while there are no suns in the sky, but very hot when the light is at its strongest. Besides the Terrestrial Embassy, its technical library, and the banquet hall, the protagonist Retief spends most of his time near the docks. At the port, he spends some time in the new ship being built where he asks Whonk to see the plans. He also does some investigation on the Moss Rock, the luxury ship where he found false evidence planted."}
{"id": "61198_5", "pid": "61198_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting for this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28880, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on the planet Fust, where a chancery houses the Terrestrial Embassy where Retief works. Fust has several suns and moons that regulate the tides of the ocean nearby. The Fustians regularly nap There is a large city surrounded by shipyards, where Retief conducts the majority of his investigation into the development of the new passenger barge. When Retief meets Whonk, they pore over blueprints for the barge in Whonk\u2019s work hut and look out the window to see the Groaci attach\u00e9 consulting with the Fustian youth that had harassed them earlier. Later, a pair of youth attack Retief at the bus station, and he returns to the shipyard to inquire after Whonk. He enters the warehouse behind Whonk\u2019s shack and finds him injured in the midst of some hay bales. From there, Whonk and Retief go to the \u201cMoss Rock\u201d\u2014a ship where the Groaci barrels filled with titanite had been taken earlier\u2014to investigate. The \u201cMoss Rock\u201d is a luxurious ship dimly lit and meant for VIP guests. This is where Retief begins to uncover the plot of the Groaci to implicate SCARS in the ship\u2019s destruction. Retief then attends the sponsorship ceremony, which is held in a banquet hall with a low-ceiling. Fustian music plays, which is inaudible to the human ear. After Slock escapes the ceremony, Retief goes back to the \u201cMoss Rock\u201d, and this is where Whonk ultimately apprehends Slock once more."}
{"id": "61198_5", "pid": "61198_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAIDE MEMOIRE\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n The Fustians looked like turtles\u2014but they could move fast when they chose!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Across the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave.\n \n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups\u2014\"\n \n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n \n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right. He'll try anything\u2014in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n \n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p\u2014that is, cement relations with this emergent power group\u2014the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n \n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group\u2014\"\n \n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This group\u2014\" he glanced at the paper\u2014\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n \n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development,\" Retief said.\n \n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n \n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow.\n \n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a positive statement.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he said.\n \n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n \n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n \n Magnan shuddered. \"Please\u2014never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n \n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n \n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters\u2014such as working with Youth groups\u2014would create a far better impression.\"\n \n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n \n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n\"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n \n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n \n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n\"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them.\"\n \n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like fission bombs.\"\n \n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n \n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n \n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n \n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n\"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n \n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n \n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n \n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief.\n \n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n\"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of papers.\"\n \n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n \n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n \n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n \n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n \n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n \n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n \n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\n \n \n\n \n The youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why should it be secret?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n\"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n \n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n \n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n \n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n \n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n \n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent day by day.\"\n \n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n \n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n \n \"The police\u2014\"\n \n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now.\"\n \n \"What's behind it?\"\n \n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with them.\"\n \n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it.\n \n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n \n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n\"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n \n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n \n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well, stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n \n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n \n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\n \n \n\n \n The second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n \n \"Retief\u2014I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence.\"\n \n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back.\n \n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n \n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n \n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n \n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up.\"\n \n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n \n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n \n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n \n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files.\n \n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm.\n \n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer\u2014and he was willing to bet the elderly Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n \n At least not willingly....\n \n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard.\n \n \n\n \n The door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle.\n \n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse.\n \n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n \n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n \n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n \n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free.\n \n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this.\"\n \n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n \n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n \n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It would be your life.\"\n \n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n \n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n \n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing.\n \n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me\u2014in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons to complete the task.\"\n \n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n \n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n \n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n \n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle.\"\n \n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n \n Slowly he got to his feet.\n \n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here.\"\n \n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n \n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n \n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n \n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock .\"\n \n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n \n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n \n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock .\n \n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n\"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep.\"\n \n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n \n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it\u2014a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n \n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n \n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n \n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He passed the metal band to Retief.\n \n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy\u2014fast.\"\n \n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace.\n \n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n \n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n \n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n \n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n \n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n \n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n \n The youth gurgled.\n \n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping.\n \n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n \n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n \n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian\u2014\n \n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n \n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old. But I thought\u2014\"\n \n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n \n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n \n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n \n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n \n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight. Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n \n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n \n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n\"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n \n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge.\n \n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n \n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n \n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n \n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about this gambit.\"\n \n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n \n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss.\"\n \n \n\n \n A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n \n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n \n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n \n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n \n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the Lament of Hatching ,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments\u2014\"\n \n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously.\n \n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n\"And if I may interrupt a moment\u2014\"\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n \n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n \n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n \n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies,\" said Magnan.\n \n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n \n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n \n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n \n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\" cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness\u2014\"\n \n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled boreholes and blasted.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is.\"\n \n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And\u2014\"\n \n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n \n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply.\n \n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n \n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about\u2014\"\n \n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n \n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n \n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n \n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n \n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead.\"\n \n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n \n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back.\n \n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're building.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief\u2014and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor.\n \n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n\"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n \n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n \n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n \n \"The Moss Rock ?\" said Magnan. \"But that was\u2014Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n \n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed.\n \n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose.\"\n \n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n \n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n \n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake.\n \n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n \n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting for this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28833, "query_start_index": 28835, "query_end_index": 28880, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story's setting is in the future on a space world named Fust, inhabited by creatures who look similar to turtles. Fust has oceans or seas large enough for passenger ships and barges which provide fish for the Fustians. Aliens come to Fust; Magnan and Retief work at the Terrestrial Embassy; the Groacis also have members on Fust. The planet has two suns: Beta, which is yellow, and Alpha, which is blue. There are also three moons. Part of the action in the story takes place in the Terrestrial Embassy. In contrast, other parts occur in the shipyard where the passenger ship is being built, its warehouse where Whonk is hidden after he is beaten, and where the explosive had been stored, aboard the barge the Moss Rock where the explosive has been moved and where Whonk puts Slock at the end of the story, and a low-ceiling banquet hall where the dinner is being held. Magnan announces Retief\u2019s sponsorship of SCARS.\n\n"}
{"id": "30062_1", "pid": "30062_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26592, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Plague takes place in the modern United States of America. The story follows several government workers as they navigate a sudden and mysterious epidemic. Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud, mostly referred to as Andy, works at the Office of the Civil Health and Germ Welfare Protection located in the Pentagon. Corporal Bettijean Baker, his right-hand woman and new lover, picks up the phone one day, and then chaos ensues. \nA switchboard is put in the hallway to help receive the hundreds of calls being made to their office. This sudden influx of calls, attention, people, and disease leave the main characters feeling overwhelmed and desperate. \nSince the new lieutenant had not arrived (post Colonel Patterson\u2019s retirement), Sergeant Andy is effectively in charge as a noncom, though not everyone is happy about that. Andy pushes their worries aside, and continues working. \nDespite the spread, no fatalities have been reported, and infections are random. No trend has been established yet, but they are searching desperately for one. Bettijean goes through reports with Sergeant Andy, revealing all she\u2019s uncovered. It\u2019s affecting workers, artists, and poets, but not necessarily those who work in government, or as doctors or businessmen. The water systems are ruled out, as well as wind and food. Bettijean and Andy are left with nothing, except the possibility of biological terrorism. \nFinally, Andy orders Bettijean to halt all in-coming calls, and redirect their attention to all hospitals. \nDespite their best efforts, no conclusion can be reached. The colonel reappears in Andy\u2019s office, followed by two officers. He throws a newspaper down on his desk, proclaiming that this epidemic was allegedly caused by the Russians, and that all the authorities are baffled. It is hinted that the Colonel commissioned this article to throw doubt on Andy\u2019s authority. Andy defends his employees and the work they\u2019ve been doing. The Colonel forces Andy and Bettijean out of office, and Andy lets him, kissing Bettijean on the way out. Suddenly, the general walks in and gives Andy back his job, while telling him the news from Intelligence. The Iron Curtain\u2019s not sent word for almost two days. Only a coded message that could have been about the epidemic. \nAndy promises to work hard again, and the general assigns the colonel and his two men to the switchboard in the hall. After brainstorming about potential causes, Janis, another employee, enters the room and puts another stack of reports down. Small college towns, newly engaged girls, poets, all these people have been infected. Janis falls to the floor, and everyone rushes to her. She\u2019s been infected with the disease, and they question her about her activities for the past 12 hours. It\u2019s revealed finally that she wrote a letter to her mother, and Andy finally figures it out. The poison was in the stamps. He lets his higher-ups know, and Janis is carted off to safety. Bettijean and Andy are given a 30-day vacation to relax and explore their relationship further. \n"}
{"id": "30062_1", "pid": "30062_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26592, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud has found himself in charge of the Office of Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection somewhat by accident. As he waits for a replacement, his superior officers nervously warn him about an epidemic that they don\u2019t understand yet, that Andy will be in charge of the response for. Corporal Bettijean Baker is Andy\u2019s assistant, in this previously under-the-radar department that is all of a sudden the most important aspect of the nation\u2019s response. Andy and Bettijean work through reports together to look for a trend, hoping to find how the epidemic is spreading. It seems to be affecting only the United States of America, without affecting Canada even though it has reached Alaska. The dumbfounded officers decide to learn more about the people who have fallen sick. When Bettijean returned with more reports, two other officers came into Andy\u2019s office to show him the headlines: the public panic had started, two days after the office had stopped sleeping to find the root of the issue. The colonel doesn\u2019t appreciate the lack of military formality in the way that Andy and Bettijean are taking, and he angrily orders them to be disciplined before the general interrupts. The general gestures to Andy and Bettijean to continue their work, and sat down with them to talk solemnly. There\u2019s some suspicion about the Soviet Union\u2019s involvement. Recognizing Andy\u2019s need for manpower, the general assigns the very unhappy colonel to report to Andy and Bettijean for as long as the epidemic is going on. Lighting a new cigarette, Andy gets back to work. The team found evidence of small business workers being sick, but no government workers (outside of some in a hospital), no doctors, and no postal workers. They take this as evidence that it\u2019s not communicable, but they find some cities are more affected than others. Writers, poets, artists, and musicians in cities that are often vacation spots are hit hard, along with small college towns. They are interrupted by screams outside their door when Janis falls sick. When she\u2019s able to talk, Andy asks Janis questions about the past twelve hours. She had written and mailed a letter to her mother about the epidemic, but nothing else seemed out of place. Andy pondered over another cigarette as the doctor saw to Janis. Andy suddenly had an idea, frantically searched for Janis\u2019 purse, and handed one of her postage stamps to a lab technician. His hunch was right: the stamp was the problem, licking the glue was how people got sick. Andy starts on a plan to notify the public of the issue, and to investigate the source of the poison in the stamps. The lab was able to identify the toxin, and it would be simple to treat. The general took over giving orders, and gave Andy and Bettijean a month of furlough before marching the stamp out of the office as Andy and Bettijean looked at each other longingly. "}
{"id": "30062_1", "pid": "30062_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26592, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story describes members of the U.S. military Germ Warfare Protection Division as they struggle to understand the cause of a mysterious illness. Sergeant Major Andy McCloud and his Corporal Bettijean Baker slowly learns the details of the pandemic. It is entirely confined to the United States and seems to affect people according to no discernable pattern. The illness is not passed person to person and has affected people regardless of age, location, and behavior while other people are spared.\n\nHigh ranking military officials (the brass) express to Andy the urgency of the situation. As the day wears on, Andymust deal with threats to his operation from officers that believe that, as a noncommissioned officer, He is not qualified to perform his task regardless of his obvious expertise.\n\nVague trends begin to emerge. Large offices see no cases while small ones do; doctors and dentists are mostly unaffected while writers and poets are.\n\nEventually a woman working the phones in the Germ Warfare Protection division falls ill and Andy solves the riddle of the illness. Stamp adhesive is determined to be the vector for the illness. With the mystery solved, a plan to halt the spread of the illness is formulated and the brass gives Andy and Bettijean a vacation furlough and promise of a promotion."}
{"id": "30062_1", "pid": "30062_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26592, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sergeant Andrew McCloud is in charge of the office of Germ War Protection when a mysterious plague breaks out in the United States. His coworker Bettlejean tells him that all kinds of people are coming down with the illness, but no one has died yet. The strangest part about the new disease is that it has only affected Americans. Not even Canadians or Mexicans have become sick. \n\nMcCloud decides to send everyone who works in the office out to do some investigating about where the illness is coming from. He tells Bettlejean that the two of them will work in Washington. They begin to put together clues about the nature of the illness when suddenly a woman in the office, Janis, drops to the ground. She is red and feverish and extremely nervous. After some prodding, she admits that she broke an office rule when she mailed her mother a letter that included information about the outbreak. \n\nAfter a few moments of reflection, McCloud runs to Janis\u2019s office and tears through her drawers to find her stamps. He sends the lab technician to test them, but he is already convinced that the stamps contain poison, and they are behind the mysterious illness. \n\nWhen his superior comes in to ask him what he has discovered, McCloud divulges his beliefs about the problematic stamps. McCloud suggests that the President make an announcement to the public about the poisonous stamps. However, he quickly realizes that the stamps could have been tainted accidentally, and this doesn\u2019t necessarily point to an attack on the country. McCloud is interrupted by a phone call from the lab. The technician informs him that the illness the stamps cause has a quick fix, and the people who are ill are going to be just fine. McCloud allows someone else to take over. He\u2019s too tired and elated to make any more decisions. \n\nThe general offers McCloud and Bettlejean many awards and some time off to get to know each other better. He can tell that they are quite fond of each other. \n\n\n"}
{"id": "30062_2", "pid": "30062_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Sergeant Andy McCloud throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ten days prior to the epidemic, Colonel Patterson retired. He was Sergeant Andy McCloud\u2019s superior, and his replacement has yet to show up. Andy theorizes that the replacement for the lieutenant got caught up in all the red tape, but, at the end of the day, the newly-coined Germ War Protection needed a leader. And Andy was stepping up to the job. \n\tHe had worked at the Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Coordinator for two years prior to the epidemic. He knew the ins and outs of the place, so, despite being a noncom, he was truly the best for the job. \n\tOne of his colleagues, Corporal Bettijean Baker, had picked up the phone two days prior, and suddenly their whole words changed. An epidemic was sweeping the nation, infecting random people left and right with no underlying cause or trend, and, despite the absence of fatalities, panic was ensuing. Though some of the officers disapprove of Andy\u2019s noncom position, he continues working tirelessly with his colleagues to try and figure out the cause of this terrifying disease. \n\tHe and Corporal Bettijean Baker brainstorm throughout the story, desperately searching for a trend or place of infection. They realize that artists, poets, college students, and workers are the ones being infected; not necessarily doctors, dentists, and government employees. They try to figure out what activities each group does that could possibly have been the cause of their infection. They quickly rule out the disease traveling through water, wind, and food. And, later on, it\u2019s revealed that the disease is not contagious. Bettijean and Andy put their heads together and think. \n\tTheir time spent together brainstorming was also filled with flirtatious moments. Andy, with his freckles and messy hair, and Bettijean with her jet-black hair, share a kiss or two throughout the story. \n\tAfter exhausting themselves, Andy orders all the girls to redirect all calls to go out, not in. They are to focus on hospitals and relief crews, to discover more on who the virus is infecting. He and Bettijean are almost fired by the disgruntled colonel, who came with two replacements. Thankfully, just as Andy kisses Bettijean, the general walks in and dismisses the colonel. He reinstates Andy and Bettijean to their former and rightful positions, before telling them that the Iron Curtain has gone silent, except for one coded message from two days before, possibly hinting at the epidemic. \n\tAfter the brass left, Bettijean and Andy brainstormed some more, looking through new reports brought in by Janis, a colleague. Janis soon collapses, and it is revealed that she\u2019s been infected. Andy questions her and soon discovers the transmitter of the virus. Stamps! He relates the news to his higher-ups, and rejoices with Bettijean. They are given a 30-day furloughed vacation together, leaving the reader with a future of romance and hope. \n"}
{"id": "30062_2", "pid": "30062_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Sergeant Andy McCloud throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sergeant Andy McCloud was the highest-ranking officer in the Office of Civil Health and Germ Warfare protection when the retired Co-ordinator\u2019s replacement didn\u2019t show up, so he found himself in charge of the office just as a nationwide epidemic was surging. He is berated by some of his superior officers who couldn\u2019t fathom the idea of an officer not in a combat role being in charge of such a large issue, but pushed through and continued trying to work on a solution. He goes through piles of reports with Corporal Bettijean Baker, his assistant, trying to find something that connects the victims. The two of them work through a variety of emotions, including frustration, exhaustion, confusion, and exasperation. When the colonel comes back into Andy\u2019s office to yell more about the severity of the situation that he doesn\u2019t seem to think Andy is the right person to handle, Andy acknowledges him curtly, which makes the colonel relieve Andy of his duties. This whole time, Bettiejean is standing with him, gripping his shoulder in his defense. The threat doesn\u2019t stick, even though Andy was somewhat relieved to have a chance to sleep, as a captain walks in and tells him to continue working. The captain tells the colonel that he and his captains have to report to Andy for the remainder of the crisis. During each of these interactions with superior officers, Andy relies on smoking a cigarette to find some focus, and tries to listen to the captain\u2019s report about possible influence from the Soviet Union. He is upset, and in his exhaustion, loses hope for a moment as the general asks him what Andy can do about the situation, but then finds the courage to stand up and say that he\u2019ll get the job done as long as people work with him on it. He worked through more reports with Bettijean until they were interrupted by a scream as Janis, one of the office workers, fell sick at her desk. Andy called for a doctor and a chemist, asked Janis everything that had happened to her that day, and pondered over the new evidence over another cigarette. He has an epiphany, frantically looks for Janis\u2019 book of stamps in her purse, and sends a stamp with a lab technician. His hunch was right: the toxin that spreads the disease is on the adhesive side of the stamps. As he works on a response plan with the general, he calls out a few orders and then defers to the general to make the rest of the decisions in his exhaustion. The general then offers Andy and Bettiejean a month of furlough so that they can spend time with one another, and they look into each other\u2019s eyes excited to explore their connection. "}
{"id": "30062_2", "pid": "30062_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Sergeant Andy McCloud throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Andy begins the story as a non-commissioned officer running the Germ Warfare Protection division during a crisis. He was never assigned a commanding officer after his previous colonel's retirement 10 days prior. As a result he continually has to defend his standing and prove that he is the right individual to solve the mystery of the illness.\n\nHe works doggedly to try and establish a pattern or trend for the illness and calls tirelessly every hospital in the country until his hand cramps from writing and his voice verges on giving out.\n\nHe has to navigate an attempted takeover by the chicken colonel and his young officers. Eventually he pieces the mystery together by speaking to Janis, a phone operator who falls ill after licking a stamp. Finally he provides his recommendation on how to stop the illness and is rewarded with a long vacation and promotion.\n\n"}
{"id": "30062_2", "pid": "30062_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Sergeant Andy McCloud throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Andy has been working at the Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection for two years when all hell breaks loose. He is put in charge of finding out how the new American plague is spreading, and he is deeply stressed. Chicken colonel attempts to discipline him for insubordination, but the two star general shoots down that idea and asks McCloud to keep working the case with everything he\u2019s got.\n\nMcCloud and Bettlejean look through reports and gather that the disease is not communicable, and it is not only affecting people of a certain class or geographical area. The only clues that they can piece together are that the illness is affecting people who work in small offices rather than large buildings. They also recognize that artists and poets are becoming sick when doctors and dentists are not. \n\nMcCloud\u2019s subordinate, a woman named Janis, suddenly becomes ill. After he questions her about her day and activities, he realizes that the culprit behind the outbreak must be postage stamps. He locates one of the stamps that Janis had in her work desk and sends it to be tested in the lab. \n\nWhen his boss, the general, comes in to hear about McCloud\u2019s findings, he says with confidence that the postage stamps are behind the epidemic. When the lab confirms his suspicions, he is hailed as the hero. The general gives him time off to relax and recuperate from this entire ordeal, and he suggests that McCloud spend some of that time with Bettlejean. McCloud is so excited to get some alone time with his coworker that he barely hears the general detail the awards and accolades that McCloud will receive for his job well done. \n\n"}
{"id": "30062_3", "pid": "30062_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Corporal Bettiejean and Sergeant Andy.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26634, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sergeant Andrew McCloud is Corporal Bettijean Baker\u2019s superior, both in rank and position at the Germ War office. They have worked together before, perhaps for the two years that Andy has been stationed there. Their relationship ranges from colleagues to lovers, sharing kisses at work or gentle shoulder touches, while still maintaining a professional atmosphere. \n\tThey begin the story extremely stressed, due to the sudden epidemic, and use their combined brain power to find the root cause of the disease. After hours of working together and defending each other to their higher-ups, they are able to identify different groups of people that have been infected, all of which are random and don\u2019t show a clear trend. After the truth is discovered, that the disease is being spread through licking stamps, Corporal Bettijean and Sergeant Andrew are granted a 30-day vacation together, with the promises of getting to know each other better. They accept gratefully, and stare into each other\u2019s eyes. \n\tThough their relationship may be inappropriate in the modern office, it\u2019s clear through their constant defense of the other and dedication to the cause, that their romance is just as strong as their professional relationship. \n"}
{"id": "30062_3", "pid": "30062_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Corporal Bettiejean and Sergeant Andy.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26634, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Corporal Bettiejean and Sergeant Andy are colleagues at the Office of Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection. When Andy is suddenly in charge as the Co-ordinator of the office, Bettiejean is his assistant. The two of them work together to comb through the reports about various aspects of infrastructure that could be responsible for the transmission of the epidemic. Part of this process involves a lot of brainstorming, and throwing ideas back and forth about what the problem could be. When their superior officers come by, and the colonel starts yelling at Andy, Bettiejean defends him and tries to make the colonel realize his rude behavior is entirely unhelpful, which is eventually escalated into an emotional discussion as her grip on Andy\u2019s shoulder grows tighter. She supports him in other ways, too, including handing Andy a match when he tries to light a cigarette, which he does often. The two of them kept the hope for a solution in mind as they worked through more piles of reports, and when Andy develops his theory about the postage stamps being the culprit, it is Bettijean that he sends to call in their superiors. She comes into his office to check on him, and is there while Andy explains that they have a solution. Apparently their interactions have been visible to the rest of the staff in the office, as the general gives them a month of furlough after the root of the problem has been identified, teasing them a bit about the chance to get to know each other. As the story ends, they are looking into each other\u2019s eyes longingly, ready to take the month off. "}
{"id": "30062_3", "pid": "30062_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Corporal Bettiejean and Sergeant Andy.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26634, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bettijean and Andy are in a professional relationship with Andy as Bettijean's superior. They are also on close personal terms with romantic overtones.\n\nAs the crisis intensifies, Andy and Bettijean work together to pour through the details of the illness. They view each other as a team although with Bettijean clearly subordinate to Andy. She follows Andy's orders but is also valued for her contribution and viewed as an equal.\n\nAs the crisis is averted, the pair are rewarded with a vacation furlough and pending promotion. The pair are only excited about the furlough and it is implied that they will spend it together as lovers. "}
{"id": "30062_3", "pid": "30062_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Corporal Bettiejean and Sergeant Andy.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26634, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Corporal Bettlejean and Sargeant McCloud have a friendly and important relationship. Bettlejean shows her intense interest in McCloud when she checks in on him about how he\u2019s feeling and how their colleagues are treating him. She tries her best to help Andy in his work and set him up to be successful at his job. When McCloud wants to fire back at colonel chicken for what he sees as mistreatment, Bettlejean gently reminds him to keep his composure with only a small and silent gesture. \n\nMcCloud looks at the various groups of people who have come down with the sickness and compares them to those that are fine, and he realizes that the illness is most likely caused by licking postage stamps. Bettlejean beams with pride as he makes his announcement. She is not jealous of his sharp wit and hard work. She supports his reasoning and immediately congratulates him on his brilliant idea. \n\nThroughout the story, McCloud and Bettlejean work together to solve the mystery, and they are quietly  flirtatious, even in front of their coworkers. It is clear that the general has picked up on their attraction to one another when he suggests that they use their much deserved time off to get to know each other better. The two confirm that they will in fact be seeing more of each other when they hold hands at the news. \n\n"}
{"id": "30062_4", "pid": "30062_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Janis's character on the rest of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26633, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In short, without Janis, Sergeant Andrew McCloud would not have discovered the cause of the epidemic as quickly or at all. \n\tNear the end of the story, Janis, an attractive blonde woman, enters Sergeant Andy\u2019s office to deliver another stack of reports before him and Corporal Bettijean. The two of them had been analyzing the reports and statistics for several hours now, desperate to find a trend amongst those infected. So far, they had come up with nothing concrete, except for the types of people who were getting infected. Working people, artists, poets, newly engaged women, and small office workers were all turning up sick. Bigger offices, postal workers, doctors, dentists, and government workers were all fine. So, what\u2019s the connection? \n\tAfter nervously delivering the reports, Janis quickly scurries out of the office and back to her desk elsewhere. Bettijean and Andy notice that the adult population in Aspen, Colorado; Taos; and Santa Fe, New Mexico is rapidly falling ill, all towns with prominent artistic industries. \n\tThey keep pouring over the reports, making new discoveries but still not coming up with any answers. Suddenly, a girl cries out from beyond his office. They hear a body fall to the floor, and they quickly rush out as the sounds of screaming emerge. Andy sends Bettijean to retrieve a doctor and a chemist, while he runs to help. Janis was lying on the floor, in pain and scared. Luckily, the virus is not contagious, so Andy and the others were able to help her. \n\tAndy interrogates her, asking detailed questions about her day and the past 12 hours. He tries to ascertain all the moments of her life, so he can pinpoint where and how she got infected. Her symptoms match up with the epidemic at hand (a fever and feeling dizzy), so Andy knows this is his best shot to find the origin. \n\tSlowly, she recounts her day and tells them all about what she did, where she was, and what she ate. She hides one thing though, which Andy quickly forces out of her. She wrote a letter to her mother, telling her about the epidemic and how scary it was. This is against regulations, as shown through Andy\u2019s grunt of disapproval. She mailed it with her own stamps, not with a government envelope. \n\tAndy puts all the puzzle pieces together in his mind and realizes that all those people, Janis included, had one thing in common: writing letters. The poison was in the stamp. Without Janis, Andy would have struggled far longer to discover the illness and halt the production and sale of all stamps nationwide. \n\t\n"}
{"id": "30062_4", "pid": "30062_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Janis's character on the rest of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26633, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Janis is the first person to fall sick with the mysterious disease in the Office of Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection. She had been one of the people delivering reports to Andy\u2019s office, and head seemed nervous when she had entered last. She had fallen at her desk, and was shivering and horrified at what had happened. Once she was able to talk with Andy, he was able to ask her questions about her day. This was important because Andy had not yet found a connection that tied the victims of the epidemic together. He insisted that he tell her everything, and the fact that she sent a letter to her mother was the crucial fact that allowed Andy to put the story together. He was able to have Janis\u2019 postage stamps tested for a toxin on the glued side, allowing him to finally find the root of the sickness and start the nationwide response, including giving the lab enough information to find out what was needed for a treatment. "}
{"id": "30062_4", "pid": "30062_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Janis's character on the rest of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26633, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Janis is the phone operator who falls ill as they are working to solve the mystery of the pandemic. She becomes the key to unlocking the mystery as she describes her day to Andy. She informs him that she sent a letter to her mother earlier in the day. This, along with the trends that are becoming apparent in the sick populations allows Andy to deduce that licking stamp adhesive is what is making people sick."}
{"id": "30062_4", "pid": "30062_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Janis's character on the rest of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26633, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Janis is the first person in McCloud\u2019s office to become sick. First, she comes in to give him a report, and she fidgets and moves like she is nervous. Only a few minutes later, she collapses in the hallway. She is feverish and dizzy. \n\nWhen McCloud pressures her to tell him everything that she has consumed and done in the last day or so, Janis admits that she broke government regulations when she mailed a letter to her mother that detailed the epidemic. McCloud points out that she hardly let out a secret. The news of the epidemic has spread far and wide at this point. \n\nHe contemplates her story for several minutes and realizes that in order to send the letter, Janis must have licked a stamp. Janis\u2019s illness turned out to be the essential clue. Without her explanation of the steps she took before she became sick, McCloud would not have the information he needed to solve the puzzle. \n"}
{"id": "30062_5", "pid": "30062_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to the \"chicken colonel\" throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "From the start, the colonel does not approve of Sergeant Andrew McCloud. His gray eyes carry disapproval and irritation in them. As a member of the brass, the colonel strives for everything to be official and approved of, unlike the sergeant\u2019s recent promotion. The replacement for the retired colonel had not yet arrived, and the chicken colonel is not thrilled. To have a noncom, defined as a noncommissioned officer, in charge of this office while in the midst of a national epidemic is ludicrous, in his eyes. \n\tDespite voicing his doubts and grievances, Sergeant Andy is allowed to continue working as the head-of-office, at least for the time being. The colonel steals away and plots his next move. \n\tSeveral hours later, he returns, this time with two officers in tow. He walks into Sergeant Andy\u2019s office where he and Corporal Bettijean were looking through a stack of papers. With a defiant stride, the colonel tosses a newspaper onto the Sergeant\u2019s desk. Andy reads it and quickly throws it across the room. The article tells the tale of a red plague taking over America, a possible plot from Russia, and baffled government officials. The colonel brought in the article--and possibly helped write it--to convey the seriousness of the situation, but Andy takes it as an offense instead. \n\tHis colleague, Corporal Bettijean, defends Andy and reprimands the colonel at the same time. The captain behind him scolds her in return. After Sergeant Andy recites a list of excuses for his office, the colonel tells him that his insubordination will not be allowed. He calls for his removal, as well as Corporal Bettijean's, and promotes the two officers from the surgeon general\u2019s office to take their positions. \n\tAfter some fight, Andy relents and stands up, releasing himself of his duty. He kisses his colleague once, before she tries to fight back again. The general walks in and quickly demotes the colonel and his men to working at the switchboard, where the reader can assume they stay for the rest of the story. \n"}
{"id": "30062_5", "pid": "30062_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to the \"chicken colonel\" throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Andy\u2019s first impression of the colonel (at least in terms of this story) is of the colonel whining about Andy being in charge, insistent that only officers in combat roles should be in charge of a situation as large as a nationwide epidemic. After Andy is able to work through some reports with Bettiejean, the colonel returns to throw a newspaper on Andy\u2019s desk to show the headlines, proving that the public panic has started. In this very tense encounter, the colonel continued to insist that Andy needed to understand the gravity of the situation, without recognizing that of course Andy knew that the issue was serious. He and a young captain overreacted to Bettiejean trying to calm the situation, citing insubordination, and the colonel tries to relieve Andy and Bettiejean of their duties before he is interrupted by a general. This general then assigns the colonel to report to Andy and Bettiejean for the remainder of the crisis, which makes the colonel even more upset. Near the end of the story, after the lab has a report about the toxin on the stamps, the colonel is already trying to take charge again. He reaches for Andy\u2019s phone to start making calls even though Andy is the one in charge of the office, and is the point-person for the epidemic. The colonel is again put in his place by his general, and is eventually sent out of the building with the rest of the officers."}
{"id": "30062_5", "pid": "30062_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to the \"chicken colonel\" throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The chicken colonel (slang for a full colonel--an officer with an eagle as an insignia) is an individual who is preoccupied with rank and traditional military chain-of-command formality. The fact that Andy is a noncommissioned officer operating without direct commissioned officer oversight is unacceptable to him.\n\nWhile the brigadier general sees Andy's expertise and places him in charge of the investigation, the chicken colonel immediately acts to try to undermine Andy's command. He arrives with two young officers to take over the Germ Protection Division but is stopped by an even higher ranking officer--the brigadier. The chicken colonel and his subordinates are assigned to work the phones in a humiliating defeat."}
{"id": "30062_5", "pid": "30062_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE PLAGUE\n \n\n By TEDDY KELLER\n \n \n  Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n \n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line\u2014in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause\u2014by saying, \"Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n \n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n \n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge.\"\n \n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg.\"\n \n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\" he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n \n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n \n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n\"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n \n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.\n \n \n \n Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n\"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n \n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n \n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a little time.\"\n \n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n \n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.\n \n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,\u2014and a bunch more. No indication there. Except\"\u2014she fished out a one-page report\u2014\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it.\"\n \n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n \n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers\u2014rich, poor\u2014from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary.\"\n \n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n \n \"In food?\"\n \n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time\u2014even if it was sabotage?\"\n \n \"On the wind?\"\n \n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country\u2014even Alaska and Hawaii\u2014without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n \n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n \n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.\n \n \"We've got to find a clue\u2014a trend\u2014an inkling of something.\" He nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n \n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.\n \n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\n \n \n \n It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n \n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n \n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n \n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n \n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation.\"\n \n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n \n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n \n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n\"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n \n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n\"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man\u2014\"\n \n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n \n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n\"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n \n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't know from\u2014\"\n \n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\n \n \n \n And from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n \n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh, general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just\u2014\"\n \n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n \n \"But, general, I\u2014\"\n \n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n\"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n \n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n \n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had feared.\"\n \n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n \n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had a report\u2014nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen\u2014not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had\u2014it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor\u2014was an indication of something big in the works.\"\n \n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n \n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that they could cripple us from within.\"\n \n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n \n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.\n \n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n \n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n \n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned\u2014\"\n \n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated\u2014unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work.\"\n \n \n \n The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n \n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she asked.\n \n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n\"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick.\"\n \n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n \n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers\u2014business, not government\u2014and new parents and newly engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n \n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n \n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n \n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n \n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?\"\n \n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n \n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n \n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n \n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same thing\u2014only not quite as severe\u2014in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n \n \"Writers?\"\n \n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit.\"\n \n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are fine\u2014writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n \n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n \n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together.\"\n \n \"What does it show?\"\n \n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up\u2014no medical releases. Must mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n\"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public.\"\n \n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n \n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n \n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n \n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n \n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n\"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n \n \"The answer?\"\n \n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What\u2014\"\n \n \n \n In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n \n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n \n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n \n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n \n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n \n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n \n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n \n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet.\"\n \n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n \n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that you did\u2014everything you ate or drank\u2014in the last ... oh, twelve hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n \n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n \n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n \n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.\n \n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\" Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n \n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n \n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n \n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n \n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n \n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n \n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n \n \"But ... but....\"\n \n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n \n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n \n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n \n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n \n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her about what we were doing here.\"\n \n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n \n \"Did you mail it?\"\n \n \"Y ... yes.\"\n \n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n\"Did I do wrong?\"\n \n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and\u2014. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n \n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.\n \n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers\u2014Aspen, Taos and college towns\u2014thousands of people sick\u2014but none in that valley in Tennessee\u2014and few government workers\u2014just one girl in his office\u2014and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter\u2014and....\n \n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n \n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n \n The technician darted out.\n \n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of everything.\"\n \n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\n \n \n \n It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n \n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?\"\n \n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't\u2014why girls from small offices were sick\u2014and why senators and postal workers weren't\u2014why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n \n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But\"\u2014he held up a four-cent stamp\u2014\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n \n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n \n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets\u2014they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And\"\u2014she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck\u2014\"Andy, you're wonderful.\"\n \n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do\u2014\"\n \n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do you suggest?\"\n \n \"Get somebody\u2014maybe even the President\u2014on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then\u2014\"\n \n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n \n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident\u2014some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\n \n \n \n The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.\n \n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n \n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n \n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up\u2014or to get better acquainted?\"\n \n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n \n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars.\"\n \n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.\n \n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to the \"chicken colonel\" throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 26550, "query_start_index": 26552, "query_end_index": 26621, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Chicken colonel comes into McCloud\u2019s office and demonstrates his dismay with McCloud\u2019s handling of the crisis thus far by slamming a newspaper on the desk. When McCloud and Bettlejean dismiss his criticisms and explain that they have been awake for days, working around the clock, chicken does not bat an eye. Instead, he excuses them from their work to discipline them. \n\nHowever, he is swiftly interrupted by the general who insists that McCloud be in charge of the entire operation, regardless of his rank. He sends chicken colonel to man the phone lines with the rest of his staff. \n\nWhen McCloud announces that he believes American postage stamps have been poisoned, chicken colonel immediately picks up his phone and tries to take the lead once more. The general tells him to stop because McCloud is in charge of what the next steps are.  \n\n\n\n\n\n"}
{"id": "30004_1", "pid": "30004_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20820, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins in a living room where a husband and wife sit in their respective chairs, the wife wearing a headset called a telovis. The husband, Herbert Hyrel, figures she is watching a sex-opera as her escapist entertainment of choice, and waits a few minutes to start his own entertainment. As we waits, he considers his anger towards his wife: he no longer resented the time she spent not talking to him, while utilizing her telovis, but he did hate that she controlled the purse-strings in the household and gave him a small allowance. His anger had been pent up for some time, enough that he wanted to kill his wife, but for now he was satisfied with the idea of killing her. Once enough time had passed, he flicked a switch on the teleporter suit he was wearing and a version of his body appeared in a cabin in the woods that he was renting, where he had left himself a fresh outfit. He headed to the Riverside Club where he hoped to encounter a woman he had met recently, and when he got there he sat down and drank some cheap whiskey. He encountered a costumed woman who teased him, pulled away to dance with someone else, but came back to dance with him once the man she was with disappeared.  This man had flipped the switch on his suit, disappearing and leaving behind a pile of clothes, presumably because he would have been discovered wherever his original body was. As Herbert danced and moved outside, he spotted the woman he had been looking for, wearing a suggestive costume and a platinum wig, her body and her purse all covered in jewels. She asked him for champagne, which he was upset about because he did not have much money, but he obliged and tried to move the night forward after he had had something to drink. Again, though, she requested he spend more money on her--this time, for a private room at the club so they did not have to be outside. She said she was asking him to prove to her that she could be spoiled, but this pressure reminded him how angry he was that he had to spend the little money he had trying to escape from his wife, budgeting in a way that limited his nights out just to have some privacy. He started yelling about how he would have more money soon, and eventually admitted that he would kill his wife to get it. Hearing this, the woman he was with pulled a gun out of her purse and shot him--it was his wife all along. The scene jumps back to the house, where the wife pulls off her telovis set, smugly turns off her husband's teleporter suit, and watches him gasp for air and die. She called the police to call for a doctor, hid her own teleporter suit, and waited for the police to show."}
{"id": "30004_1", "pid": "30004_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20820, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Hyrel finds himself in a loveless and difficult marriage. His wife has withdrawn herself, sticking to her televois or 3-D TV, and only gives him a monthly allowance. Her generational wealth makes him feel emasculated and weak, which only strengthens his hatred for her. Hyrel has recently invested in a teleporter suit, one that took him six months of saving to put the down payment on. This suit allows him to leave his corporeal body and travel to a shadow realm, where his conscious spirit can roam free. He uses this to drink, party, meet women, and escape from his wife and true reality. \nHe\u2019s looking forward to traveling again, because of the woman he met last time in the flapper outfit. He hopes that this night will be the night she gives herself to him. After soaking in the wonderful thoughts of murdering his wife--which he plans to do as soon as the thought no longer brings him joy--Hyrel flicks the switch on his teleporter suit and arrives naked in a small cabin. Quickly, he changes into his cheap satin suit and makes his way to Riverside Club by taking the bus and walking. Once there, he orders a bottle of cheap whiskey, thanks to his depleting funds, and watches the masked dancers around him. A woman in a Persian-themed costume kisses him on the cheek but leaves him for another man. That man suddenly disappears, leaving only his costume behind. Hyrel reveals that those who get hurt in the shadow realm carry the hurt back with them in the real world. For example, he cut his hand in Riverside Club, and the pain traveled with him, but not the scar. \nThe Persian dancer joins him again, and they start to leave the club. He\u2019s drawn to another woman the same from the night before. He swaps ladies and dances with her instead. She asks for champagne, which he reluctantly purchases. \nThey drink, and then he forces her out of the club. Feeling less-than, he forces himself on her, trying to kiss and grope her. She keeps asking him if he has enough money for her, where his private room is, and if he\u2019ll be coming back soon. This only emasculates him more and he soon explodes, telling her that he\u2019s going to kill his wife so he can finally have her money and do what he wants. \nThe flapper pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head and brain. She flicks the switch, and Mrs. Hyrel wakes up in her chair. She flicks the switch on Herbert, and he comes back in a vegetative state since his body brought back the pain, but not the scar. She calls the police, alibi in check, then removes and hides her teleporter suit. She puts on a pair of blue pajamas then meets the police at the door. \n"}
{"id": "30004_1", "pid": "30004_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20820, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Hyrel is a man in an unhappy marriage who plots to murder his wife in order to be rid of her and inherit her money. Herbert despises the way his wife looks at him, and he imagines her denigrating him as a gold-digger with nothing to offer a woman, so he privately purchases a telporter suit--a thin, mesh body cover that can be worn under one's clothes and is used to transport the wearer's \"shadowy self\" to a receiver previously set in secret. While he believes his wife is watching a sex-opera using her telovis (a 3-D imaging device), Herbert engages the telporter and transports himself to a cabin situated between a highway and a river. There, he changes clothes and walks to the Riverside Club (a place where owners of telporter suits can gather to escape their dreary outer lives) where he plans to meet a girl he had met the previous night. Because telporting oneself is illegal, rooms at the club are very expensive in order to cover the costs of police protection and Herbert cannot afford a private room there with the allowance his wife gives him. The club is colorful and full of costumed, masked partyers, dancing together and drinking champagne. Herbert purchases a bottle of whiskey because he cannot afford the expensive champagne. As Herbert drinks, he becomes more relaxed and confident, and he watches a woman dressed in a Persian costume dancing with a man dressed as a bullfighter. Soon after, the bullfighter disappears, and Herbert is reminded that sometimes people at the club vanish suddenly when there is a threat they will be discovered in their outer lives. He also notices a scar on his hand and is reminded that when someone's shadow self is injured, their outer husk retains the feeling of pain but not the scar. Herbert dances with the Persian-costumed woman and becomes steadily more intoxicated by drink and by the atmosphere of revelry. Eventually, he finds the girl he had met the night before, recognizing her by her long, stockinged legs. She wears a platinum wig, a white mask, and green contact lenses, and they dance together and kiss. The drunker Herbert becomes, the more insecure he feels about his ability to satisfy the woman, and he begins lashing out at her, accidentally revealing his plans to kill his wife in order to take her money so he can start a new life with the mysterious woman. The woman laughs at him, and she withdraws a gun from her purse and shoots Herbert twice--once in the heart and then in the head. The woman is actually Mrs. Herbert Hyrel, and she has been using her own telporter suit to expose Herbert and dispose of him herself. Because Herbert\u2019s gunshot wounds do not transfer with his shadowy self back to his outer body, it appears as if Herbert simply died. Mrs. Herbert Hyrel calls the police, hides the telporter suits, and awaits their arrival."}
{"id": "30004_1", "pid": "30004_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20820, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Hyrel and his wife have an unhappy marriage. Herbert hates his wife and feels as if she thinks she is better than he is. She has money but only gives him a small allowance, and he resents her for this. She isn\u2019t fond of him either. Every night, she puts on her telovis for about three hours. Herbert thinks she is watching black-market sex-operas. Once she is caught up in the program, he uses his teleporter suit to escape to the Riverside Club. This is an exclusive club for people with teleporter suits, money, and a desire for self-abandonment. People go there to escape their boring, unpleasant lives and wear costumes to hide their identities while they engage in drunken, sexually-abandoned activities. Herbert has met a girl there and wants to see her again. He looks for her when he first arrives but doesn\u2019t see her, so he is interested in a Persian dancing girl who flirts with him. She is with a man dressed as a toreador. Herbert catches a glimpse of the scar on his hand where he had cut it at the club three weeks ago. In his unteleported body, he feels the pain of the cut but has no cut. \n\tLater in the evening, the toreador disappears from the dance floor, leaving behind a pool of his clothes. This means that he had to teleport back to his real life immediately; it is something that has happened many times at the club. Emboldened by his whiskey, Herbert moves in and embraces the Persian dancing girl. He draws her toward the exit to the gardens when he sees a long leg wearing a black mesh stocking protruding from a private booth. That is what the girl from the previous evening was wearing. He pulls the stockinged girl from the booth and dances with her. The stockinged girl is wearing a can-can dancer costume. She insists on having a glass of champagne before Herbert takes her outside. While she drinks, he worries that he won\u2019t be able to see her again until he gets his next allowance in two weeks and that she will find someone else in the meantime. He decides that he is going to kill his wife so he can have her money. When he tries to take the girl outside, she resists. She lets him know she wants him to have the money for a private room, show her a good time, and come see her often. He tells her he\u2019ll have plenty of money after tonight and that he will kill his wife to get it. The dancer pulls a gun from her purse and shoots him. \n\tMrs. Hyrel removes her telovis and pushes Herbert\u2019s teleport button to bring him back. His eyes open, and then he dies. She calls the police, saying something horrible has happened to her husband. Then she changes clothes, removing her teleporter suit, and hiding it behind a hidden door at the back of the medicine cabinet.\n"}
{"id": "30004_2", "pid": "30004_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert's wife and what is her role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20846, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert's wife controls the financial affairs in their household. She is a fan of her telovis set, her preferred medium for escapist entertainment, and Herbert is under the impression that she likes to watch sex-operas, which are a longer experience that rely on emotional build-up. She makes most of the money but also controls it all, which Herbert resents her for--he thinks she is keeping it from him, and feels looked down upon when she gives him his allowance. This infantilizing attitude makes him extremely angry. She is devious and cunning, and hatches a plan to catch him in his act. It is her, after all, that drove him to want to escape. Either to confirm suspicions of a murder plot or to disrupt his own escapist time, she has her own teleporter suit that she uses to position herself to seduce her husband in the one place he figured he would be free from her. She dresses up covered in jewels and insists that he spend money on her to pressure him to admitting that he has none, which eventually pushes him to admit his plan. She kills him once she hears this, and calmly puts everything back in order as she reports something being wrong with her husband to the police, clearly not upset that her husband is dead. "}
{"id": "30004_2", "pid": "30004_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert's wife and what is her role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20846, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mrs. Herbert Hyrel is the daughter of a wealthy family. Although she and Herbert most likely originally married for love, their relationship quickly spiraled out of control and soon their disparity in wealth became a pressing issue. \nMrs. Hyrel withdrew herself from her husband once she felt that he was only with her for her money. She allotted him a monthly allowance, but that was all. Since Herbert was not the breadwinner, he felt emasculated and out of control in his own home. She is the instigator for his violent fantasies of killing her, and the woman that draws him back to Riverside Club. \nHer jewel-studded flapper dress that reveals her legs reveals her wealth and status at the Riverside Club. She wears green contacts and a platinum wig to further disguise herself from Herbert. Despite being married, he fails to recognize her, and, after tempting him and berating him, he reveals to her his plans to murder his wife. She then murders him in the shadow realm, killing his soul there but leaving his corporeal body intact in the real world. After traveling back to their home, Mrs. Herbert Hyrel supposedly gets away with the murder by pretending to be the doting wife concerned for her husband\u2019s health. She also has a rock-solid alibi with the televois and the fact that Hyrel was in an illegal teleporter suit. \n"}
{"id": "30004_2", "pid": "30004_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert's wife and what is her role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20846, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mrs. Herbert Hyrel is a strong, financially independent woman loathed by her husband because he feels she considers him less of a man because of his reliance upon her. At the beginning of the story, she wears a telovis--a device used to render 3-D images of remote performances in one's own living room. Herbert suspects she is using the device to watch a sex-opera, and that explains the slight smile on her face as he watches her. In reality, she is likely smiling because she is confident in her plan to catch Herbert at the Riverside Club and kill him there. Mrs. Hyrel provides Herbert a small allowance, which he saves up to purchase his own telporter suit, not knowing that she also has one. Mrs. Hyrel uses Herbert's tendency toward fantasy as an advantage in her plot against him. She takes on the persona of the mysterious woman, wearing a white mask, green contact lenses, and a platinum blonde wig. She seduces Herbert, and eventually kills him when he admits his plot to her. She knows she will get away with his murder because once his shadowy self transfers back into his body, there will be no visible wounds."}
{"id": "30004_2", "pid": "30004_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert's wife and what is her role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20846, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert\u2019s wife is the can-can girl that he met at the Riverside Club the night before, but he doesn\u2019t recognize her. She detests Herbert and resents having to give him some of her money. She acts as if he tricked her into marrying him and now treats him like an irresponsible child. Every night, she escapes from him when she puts on her telovis and watches shows for three hours. The night in the story, we learn that she actually teleports to the Riverside Club, too. At the club the night before, she met Herbert and flirted with him so much that he couldn\u2019t wait to see her again. When he goes to the club the night that the story takes place, he looks for her, finally finds her, and pulls her out of a booth to him. She wears a can-can dancer outfit that highlights her long legs. Herbert tries to take her outside immediately, but she insists on having champagne first. She drinks her champagne slowly while Herbert is anxious that he might have to teleport back. Herbert decides that he will go ahead and kill his wife, as he has been thinking about doing for quite some time. They dance, and then Herbert tries to pull her outside. Mrs. Hyrel asks if he doesn\u2019t have a private room he can take her to. Frustrated, he drags her outside, but she pushes away from him and says she needs to know he can afford a private room, show her a good time, and come there often to see her. When he says he\u2019ll have money after tomorrow night, she insists they will wait until then. Angry and desperate, Herbert vows he will kill his wife, and then he will have money. Mrs. Hyrel laughs and asks who he will kill, and he repeats it even though he realizes he shouldn\u2019t. She removes a gun from her purse and shoots him in the heart and the head. She teleports back home, presses his teleporter button, and after he dies, she calls the police saying that something horrible has happened to her husband. Before the police arrive, she changes out of her teleporter suit and hides it behind a hidden back in the medicine cabinet.\n"}
{"id": "30004_3", "pid": "30004_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the dynamic between Herbert and his wife\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20839, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship Herbert and his wife have seems to have an infantilizing or patronizing tone to it. His wife seems to be fairly cold towards him, at least from the way she interacts with his death in the last scene of the story, but Herbert is harboring a large amount of hate and anger. A lot of this dynamic is driven by the control of money in the household, as Herbert's wife is in charge of these decisions, and Herbert does not agree with her on how much money he should have access to. His anger increases as he works on a plan to get away from her, as he spends what little he has to maintain access to the Riverside Club, paying rent on a cabin, buying a teleporter suit, and similar expenses. He is finally pushed to make the choice to finally want to kill her when he finds he does not have the spending money to be able to buy nice drinks or private rooms for himself and the woman he meets at the club, who turns out to be his wife. "}
{"id": "30004_3", "pid": "30004_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the dynamic between Herbert and his wife\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20839, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hyrel have a constant struggle for power within their domestic relationship. Mrs. Hyrel\u2019s family wealth insults Herbert, seeing as he has none. When she comes to the realization that he may only be with her because of her money, she starts to hide it from him and only gives him a monthly allowance. At that moment, Mrs. Hyrel took control and took most of Herbert\u2019s power away from him. \nIt\u2019s clear that Hyrel wants to be the man of the relationship or the one that wears the pants. So this action made him feel weak and unimportant. This further aggravated their marriage and led to a build-up of long-term resentment. \nMrs. Hyrel practically ignores Herbert, spending her evenings watching the televois. She doesn\u2019t want to be bothered during this time either, since it would ruin the show. It\u2019s later revealed that she also has a teleporter suit, so she may have been in the Riverside Club in other instances, not just watching the televois. This power struggle and wealth inequity led to Herbert\u2019s murderous fantasies and his eventual murder. \n"}
{"id": "30004_3", "pid": "30004_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the dynamic between Herbert and his wife\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20839, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story never shows the Hyrels communicating outside of their shadowy selves; this emphasizes their dysfunction as a couple and highlights their mutual disdain. Herbert thinks his wife hates him because she believes he married her for her money, and he lives off the allowances she gives him. In turn, Herbert feels emasculated, and blames this on her, despite the fact that he does nothing but take her money and use it to attempt to seduce women at the Riverside Club. Herbert compares the thought of killing his wife to a bottle of old wine; the longer one marvels at a nice, expensive bottle of wine, the better it tastes when one finally drinks it. In the same way, he relishes his scheme, almost becoming intoxicated by it. When Herbert reunites with the woman at the Riverside Club, he cannot stop worrying that his wife will remove her telovis and discover him, and he continuously obsesses over his plan with increasing urgency. Herbert is so blinded by his rage and insecurities, that he fails to realize the woman is actually Mrs. Hyrel in disguise. "}
{"id": "30004_3", "pid": "30004_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the dynamic between Herbert and his wife\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20839, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Hyrels have an unhappy marriage. In the evenings, they escape from each other, Mrs. Hyrel to her telovis shows and he to the Riverside Club. Herbert first resented Mrs. Hyrel\u2019s hours-long escape each night that left him lonely in the evenings, but then he gets his teleporter suit and can\u2019t wait for her to get wrapped up in her shows so that he can escape to the club. His resentment of his wife grew into hatred. Herbert does not have money of his own; his wife has money and gives him a \u201cpaltry\u201d allowance as if he were a child. She seems to resent him, too, because he thinks she feels like she got a bad deal in marrying him and that she was trapped into marrying him without knowing what he was really like. Herbert has been thinking of killing his wife for some time, but he doesn\u2019t want to do it right away because thinking about it is like the anticipation of enjoying an old bottle of wine. As long as the bottle is there, he can enjoy the hope of drinking it just as he can enjoy the hope of killing his wife. Even in her altered identity as the can-can dancer at the club, Mrs. Hyrel treats Herbert as inferior. She refuses to let him take her outside until he has bought her a glass of champagne; then she makes him wait a long time while she sips it. When he finally does take her outside, she refuses to do what he wants unless he can show her he has the money for a private room and to entertain her properly. Mrs. Hyrel knows that this will frustrate him even more and probably suspected that he wanted to kill her. In any case, she has planned to kill him because she brought her gun with her. When he states that he will kill his wife to have the money to entertain the girl, Mrs. Hyrel promptly shoots him. Her plan is well-thought-out because she has a hidden back to her medicine cabinet where she hides her teleporter suit before the police come. This hidden compartment has allowed her to keep her visits to the Riverside Club from Herbert and will prevent the police from suspecting her role in Herbert\u2019s death.\n\n"}
{"id": "30004_4", "pid": "30004_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of teleporter suits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20848, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Teleporter suits play an important role in the relationship of Herbert and his wife, but also in the society that they live in more broadly. In terms of broad significance, the teleporter suits are important to the Riverside Club, as only people who own one are allowed to enter. They are illegal to own, so the club had to be careful about who they let in. Even though they are frowned upon, it seems they are a popular purchase for those who can afford them. Both Herbert and his wife own one, though we don't learn that his wife has one until the end of the story. For Herbert, the teleporter suit is his ticket to spend time outside of the house that he feels trapped in, in a relationship that he is not happy in. It allows him to visit this club and meet other people. At the same time, it is these suits that allowed his wife to follow him to the club and convince him to admit his plans, eventually ending in his death. After she shoots him, she hides her own suit but leaves his on his person. Because the body in the suit and the other copy of the body experience things differently, it was a sneaky way to kill her husband. "}
{"id": "30004_4", "pid": "30004_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of teleporter suits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20848, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Teleporter suits are an illegal yet highly sought-after and expensive tech gadget in this society. With this suit, the wearer can be transported to another realm, while their body remains in place. Their souls can have fun, dance the night away, drink as much as they want, and their partners or families will never know. The next morning, however, when they return to their corporeal body, they will carry last night\u2019s hangover with them to the physical realm. \nThe teleporter suit allows Herbert Hyrel to escape his suffocating household and relish in his manly and sexual fantasies. He wants to prove himself to society and to brand himself as something he is not. In this other world, he can pretend to be a much richer, more powerful man. His rich wife makes him feel insignificant, so he takes his troubles to the shadow realm. \nThe teleporter suits allow the wearer to travel between realms, but a connection between the shadow self and body remains. Whatever happens to the shadow self, will also happen to the corporeal self, only the physical or visual element will not be there. So, if someone were to get hurt in the shadow realm, their physical body would feel the pain but would not bear the scars. \nThis allows Mrs. Herbert Hyrel to murder her husband in the shadow realm, and return to the physical world without blood or any incriminating evidence. \n"}
{"id": "30004_4", "pid": "30004_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of teleporter suits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20848, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The telporter suits catalyze the major conflict in the story. In one sense, Herbert's telporter suit represents his ability to escape what he considers to be an emasculating, oppressive marriage. On the other hand, Mrs. Hyrel's secret telporter suit leads to Herbert's eventual demise. The suits are made of a thin mesh that fits the body like a stocking and can be worn underneath one's clothes. The telporter can be engaged by flicking a small switch, and it sends its wearer to a receiver at a previously-set location. Herbert installs his receiver at a small cabin in the woods a short distance away from the Riverside Club since he cannot afford the private rooms there. Herbert does not understand the mechanics behind the suit, but he grasps its basic function--the suits transport a person's \"shadowy self\" from one's body and the body is left in \"a conscious but dream-like state.\" When the shadowy self returns, the body does not retain any scars the shadowy self may have sustained but it does feel the pain of those injuries. Self-telportation is also illegal, although the Riverside Club maintains police protection by charging high prices and paying them off. Mrs. Hyrel uses to her advantage when she foils Herbert's plans to kill her and instead kills him and makes it appear as if he simply died while engaging in illegal activity."}
{"id": "30004_4", "pid": "30004_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of teleporter suits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20848, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\n\tThe teleporter suits provide people with a means of escape from their boring or unpleasant lives. Many people have them and use them to go to the Riverside Club where they can abandon their lives and live for the pleasure of the moment without anyone knowing who they are since everyone there wears costumes and masks. In addition, self-teleportation is illegal, so no one wants anyone else to know they have teleportation suits. When people use their teleporter suits, their real bodies stay where they are in reality while their \u201cshadow\u201d bodies travel to another place. People who teleport to the Riverside Club can do anything they want without their spouses or anyone else knowing what they are doing. Meanwhile, since their real bodies remain in \u201creal life,\u201d it looks as if the person is still there, doing nothing out of the ordinary that can draw suspicion or blame from anyone who knows them. \n"}
{"id": "30004_5", "pid": "30004_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the significance of the Riverside Club in the society in general and the story in particular.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20892, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Riverside Club is a place that only the wealthy can escape to: all of the clientele have a lot of money, but they also needed a lot of money to gain access, as they have to prove that they own a teleporter suit to get in. Everyone who goes there is looking to escape themselves, but ironically Herbert escapes his wife to end up right back in front of her. Besides being a point of interest because it offered the clearest path of escape for Herbert, the club is also important because it shows glimpses into how the suits work: when someone has to leave suddenly, their clothes are left behind because it is just the copy of the body that moves. The club also was significant to the story because it provided a place for Herbert's wife to play out her plan to catch Herbert in his own plot."}
{"id": "30004_5", "pid": "30004_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the significance of the Riverside Club in the society in general and the story in particular.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20892, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Riverside Club represents the most hedonistic, wealthy, and illusion-filled group of people. It caters to the wealthy, giving them a place to escape the troubles and rules of the corporeal world and loosen up with ample drinks and scantily-clad people. The Riverside Club creates a fantasy for people to run away to, a dreamworld where cheating isn\u2019t bad, where over-drinking is normal, and where people can be whoever they want to be. \nIn the case of Mr. Herbert Hyrel, he travels to the Riverside Club to make himself feel like more of the man he wants to be. He goes there to pick up women, prove to them that he\u2019s worth something, as well as prove that same sentiment to himself. His rich wife no longer shares her money nor her time with him, which only further emasculates him. He travels to the Riverside Club in search of fantasy and other women. However, he had to use her money in order to buy the teleporter suit that could take him there. The Riverside Club eventually becomes the scene of Hyrel\u2019s reunion with his wife and subsequent murder. \n"}
{"id": "30004_5", "pid": "30004_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the significance of the Riverside Club in the society in general and the story in particular.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20892, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Riverside Club is a social club where revelers can self-telport in order to escape their outer lives and dress in lavish costumes, drink champagne, and dance and sleep together in private rooms. The club has a large main room softly lit by intermingling, colored lights. People dance on the dance floor in this room and dine and drink together at tables surrounding it. There are also private rooms and booths hidden within the walls surrounding the main room. Near the exit stands a clump of artificial palm trees which leads outside to a garden where Herbert attempts to drag the mysterious woman when they are dancing together, presumably for a sexual encounter. Herbert wants to go outside because he cannot afford a private room, and when the mysterious woman insists they wait until he can afford one, Herbert explodes in a rage and reveals his plot to kill his wife. The club is quite expensive for practical purposes--since self-telportation is illegal, they need to charge enough to cover the cost of paying off the police. The Riverside Club represents Herbert's physical and mental retreat from his miserable life and is also the environment that ultimately leads to his death."}
{"id": "30004_5", "pid": "30004_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.\n \n\n A BOTTLE OF\n   Old Wine\n \n\n\n By Richard O. Lewis\n \n\n Illustrated by KELLY FREAS\n \n \n Herbert Hyrel\n settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.\n \n She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.\n \n Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.\n \n There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.\n \n His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.\n \n He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.\n \n He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, \"I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you.\"\n \n But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!\n \n He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.\n \n Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.\n \n \n\n He let the\n thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.\n \n It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, \"Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop.\" As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....\n \n He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....\n \n He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.\n \n Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.\n \n He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him\u2014his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name\u2014streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.\n \n He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.\n \n \n\n The dank air\n of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....\n \n He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses\u2014monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor\u2014had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....\n \n Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.\n \n Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.\n \n The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.\n \n The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter\u2014hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment\u2014came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.\n \n Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.\n \n When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.\n \n He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.\n \n A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.\n \n \"Hi, honey,\" she giggled into his ear. \"Havin' a time?\"\n \n He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.\n \n This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.\n \n The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.\n \n The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.\n \n Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.\n \n Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...\n \n \n\n He looked\n at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....\n \n Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.\n \n Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before\u2014a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self\u2014and complete consciousness\u2014back to his outer self in a hurry.\n \n A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.\n \n The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.\n \n They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.\n \n His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.\n \n Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!\n \n His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.\n \n \"Been looking for me, honey?\" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.\n \n \"You know it!\"\n \n He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.\n \n Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.\n \n He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.\n \n She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.\n\"Champagne, first,\" she whispered huskily into his ear.\n \n His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....\n \n \n\n She sipped\n her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.\n \n He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.\n \n Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.\n \n Unless ...\n \n Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.\n \n He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....\n \n \"Something troubling you, honey?\"\n \n His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.\n\"No. Nothing at all!\" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. \"Come on. Let's dance.\"\n \n He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.\n \n In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. \"Let's\u2014let's go outside.\" His voice was little more than a croak.\n \n \"But, honey!\" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. \"Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside....\"\n \n Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.\n \n No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....\n \n An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.\n \n He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.\n \n She eluded him deftly. \"But, honey !\" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. \"I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms\u2014if you can't afford to show me a good time\u2014if you can't come here real often ...\"\n \n The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.\n \n \"I'll have money!\" he shouted, struggling to hold her. \"I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!\"\n \n \"Then we'll wait,\" she said.\n\"We'll wait until tomorrow night.\"\n \n \"No!\" he screamed. \"You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!\"\n \n \n\n She had gone\n coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.\n \n Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.\n \n \"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!\" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. \"You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!\"\n \n \"Silly boy!\" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. \"And just who is it you are going to kill?\"\n \n \"My wife!\" he cried. \"My wife! I'll ...\"\n \n A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.\n \n \"And so you are going to kill your wife....\"\n \n He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. \"Y-yes,\" he whispered.\n \n Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.\n \n \"Fool!\"\n \n The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.\n \n \n\n Mrs. Herbert Hyrel\n removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.\n \n Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.\n \n She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.\n \n \"Police?\" she said. \"This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor.\"\n \n She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.\n \n She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.\n \n \n THE END\n \n \n  Transcriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the significance of the Riverside Club in the society in general and the story in particular.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20778, "query_start_index": 20780, "query_end_index": 20892, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Riverside Club is an exclusive club for people with money who want to live out their fantasies without other people knowing who they are or what they are doing. The club requires its members to have money, a desire for self-abandonment, and a teleporter suit; it encourages people to act without society\u2019s limitations on its citizens. It offers alcoholic beverages, private booths and rooms, and places outdoors where couples can engage in any activity they want. The club\u2019s atmosphere is happy, fun, and exotic with altering lights, music, drinks, and dancing. It offers people the opportunity to remain physically present in their acceptable roles while escaping those roles in private. Because their real identities are hidden, people can act in ways that are uncharacteristic to them, with unpopular people becoming popular, depressed people becoming cheerful, and inferior-feeling men becoming \u201call-conquering males.\u201d \n\tIn the story, the Riverside Club is significant because it is the escape that Herbert and his wife both turn to, enabling them to act out their fantasies away from each other. However, it is ironic that the girl Herbert meets and can\u2019t wait to see again is his wife. She, however, knows who Herbert is since she is prepared and has a gun and kills him when he says he is going to murder his wife. Mrs. Hryel seems to have been going to the club to ultimately get rid of Herbert and enjoy herself since she is in a private booth with someone else when he finds her. It also seems that she has had \u201centertainment\u201d with other men because she tells him, \u201cA girl doesn\u2019t like to be taken outside,\u201d and Herbert interprets this as meaning she has had assignations with other men, but those men all had private rooms. \n"}
{"id": "51380_1", "pid": "51380_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32078, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts in a park, where we meet a a young boy who goes by the Butcher (\"Butch\"), and his dog Brute. The boy is trying to do something to the dog with a small metal tube when Hal, another boy, shows up with his own dogs, and another boy named Joggy. It turns out these are not normal dogs, but are \"uninj\", machines created to be like dogs but not able to be hurt. Butch seems bored with these countermeasures against violence, and intent on putting violence back in the world. His interactions with Hal show us that they live in a civilization where the children are given opportunities to work out any violent and angry tendencies or impulses before they are conditioned as adults. They are only allowed to visit the Time Theater to see glimpses into other societies (and thus evidence of violence) after age five, and the change in mentality happens at age six. Butch wants to use Time Bubble to travel through time, but Hal insists that this is impossible. The boys head to this theater, an incredible crystal building with an important place in this society, choosing to fly there with their hover technology. Joggy is five, so he is allowed to enter with Hal, but Butch is blocked from entering by the ushers, which Hal says is for his own protection. Joggy and Hal take a seat in a children's viewing area to look into the glowing orb of light that sits in the middle of the round theater. The orb acts as a viewport into various times and places, and is currently showing a view of Earth, Scandanavia more specifically, around year zero according to Earth calendars. There are a number of warriors in the forest scene, along with some dogs and a sorcerer, and the boys watch in earnest. As the electronic interpreter for the viewing gives the boys more information about cultural context, Butch manages to sneak in to the theater by lying to the ushers. Shortly after Butch and two young girls join the viewing, something happened that no-one thought possible: the sorcerer pushed one of the warriors through the orb of the Time Bubble, throwing him into the theater. Panic falls on the audience, and warriors and dogs continue to enter the theater as Butch and the uninjes start to fight off the time-travelers with their design keeping them from being injured. Hal is convinced that this happened because an under-five (Butch specifically) was in the theater, but the rest of the public does not know he is young and they thank him for saving the day as he fights off the warriors and the Time Bubble collapses. This is the first piece of chaos the adults have experienced in their adult lives, and the Butcher is content with how it all played out, getting to play hero in a violent setting for a day with Brute."}
{"id": "51380_1", "pid": "51380_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32078, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Brute, a dog made of hyperplastic, barks without making a noise. He is an uninje. He is programmed to be very similar to a real dog, but he is incapable of being injured. His owner, a boy named Butch, tackles him and pokes him in the eye and hits him. Butch then orders all of the dogs to fight, but becomes bored moments later. He tells his friends, Joggy and Hal that he wishes he lived like Huckleberry Finn, with the ability to get dirty and inflict pain.\n\nButch says that one day he will be the World Director, and he will bring back war. Hal, who is older and more mature, explains that Butch\u2019s desire for violence will be conditioned out of him once he turns six. He says that Butch will understand everything once he\u2019s allowed in the Time Theater to see into the past. \n\nHal and Joggy decide to go to the Time Theater. Butch climbs on Joggy\u2019s back, and they use Joggy\u2019s harness and the repulsor hemisphere to propel them forward. When the boys arrive, they warn Butch that he will be stopped by the usher. Hal explains that something dangerous might happen if a young child is allowed in. The uninjes line up obediently next to Butch. \n\nButch tries to get past the invisible wall keeping him out of the theater, but he can\u2019t. Meanwhile, Hal and Joggy enter a dilated sphincter and sit down in a transparent cubicle. They take their levitators off to enjoy the show in the dark auditorium. In the center of the room is the Time Bubble, which transmits images of the past. They watch Scandinavian warriors holding long swords, surrounded by dogs, listening to a hooded figure chant.\nJoggy has several questions about the show, and the interpreter in the room answers them. He wonders why light can\u2019t escape from the Bubble and why the warriors in the picture can\u2019t step through into the theater.\nButch appears beside his friends after he tricks his way into the theater. The Time Bubble becomes incredibly bright, and suddenly, the warrior appears outside of the Bubble. The interpreter warns the crowd that he\u2019s activating the safeguards in response. Hal blames the anomaly on Butch. \nOne of the warriors grabs a woman in the front row and picks her up. Butch refuses to sit by idly and approaches the warrior with his levitator over his head. When the warrior tries to strike Butch with his sword, he finds that the boy is protected by an invisible shield. Butch commands the uninjes to attack the warriors and their dogs, and they do. The warriors are scared of the uninjes\u2019 strength and their ability to withstand their swords. The warriors\u2019 leader commands them to get back in the Time Bubble. The Interpreter explains that he must collapse the Bubble due to this crisis. The woman who was taken by the warrior hugs and kisses Butch for saving her life. He is very proud of himself. \n"}
{"id": "51380_1", "pid": "51380_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32078, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Butch, Hal, and Joggy, are three kids of varying ages: Joggy is five, Butch is under five, and Hal is older. Butch exhibits a lot of frustration toward their non-violent and heavily age-regimented society. He says he\u2019s going to be World Director, and seems to want to be a dictator like those from the time before humanity conditioned out violence. \n\nButch goes with the other boys to Time in the Round, a place where they can see events from the past and have them explained. Because it is carefully curated for specific ages, Hal tells Butch he won\u2019t be able to enter. Butch tries anyway, but an invisible blockade they call an \u201cusher\u201d won\u2019t let him through. \n\nThe other boys watch a sorcerer and some warriors inside the Time Bubble. Before too long, Butch appears, telling them he lied his way in with a sympathetic adult. Hal is upset that he did this, and also by Butch\u2019s behavior once he\u2019s in there. Though they have been told that it would be impossible for the Time Bubble to be used for time travel, Butch yells at the sorcerer to \u201csock it to \u2018em\u201d and he listens; somehow, between Butch and the sorcerer\u2019s willpower, a few of the warriors end up outside the bubble and in the auditorium, along with their wolves. The interpreter and audience start to panic. \n\nButch takes control, order his and his friends\u2019 uninjs to attack the wolves, who are larger but not invincible like the uninjs. He orders a warrior to put down a lady he has slung over his shoulder and his uninj, Brute, bites the warrior in the ankle, causing him to drop her. Butch tells them to go back where they came from and Brute chases them back into the bubble. Butch calls Brute, and as soon as he jumps back out the bubble dims and goes back to normal. \n\nEveryone is relieved, and the adults are more talkative and less \u201cmature\u201d than usual. People discuss \u201crevised theories\u201d and both the formerly captive woman and Brute embrace and kiss Butch, but he is too dazed and happy to notice. He pets Brute and says \u201cwe came, we saw, we conquered, didn\u2019t we, Brute?\u201d \n"}
{"id": "51380_1", "pid": "51380_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32078, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A young boy named Butch plays with his pet--a dog-like, robotic \"uninj\" named Brute--along the Avenue of Wisdom in the Peace Park. Butch is rough with Brute, jabbing and poking him hard with a metal tube, but his friends Joggy and Hal come along and we learn uninjes cannot be harmed nor can they harm. They have been programmed against it. This is just one element in a post-violence world; adults have been systemically programmed against using violence to resolve conflicts between themselves, although they may use it to fight against alien enemies. Butch, however, insists his friends call him \"Butcher\" because he wants to become a dictator when he is older and bring back violence as a means of conflict resolution. His friend Hal assures him that when he is older, he will understand why removing violence from society was \"Man's greatest achievement.\" The boys make their way to the Time Theater at the end of the Avenue of Wisdom by utilizing levitators that help them swim through the air. The Time Theater is home to a large bubble that functions as a one-way viewer into pre-civilization eras. Only people over five years old are allowed into the Time Theater; the Butcher is stopped by an invisible \"usher\", leaving Hal and Joggy to enter the viewing cubicle alone. Once inside, the bubble interpreter and Hal explain to Joggy how the bubble functions. It is essentially a time-hole that allows observation because of light isotopes that leak through. But matter cannot pass through the bubble, which is why it cannot be used for time travel. However, some scientists theorize that people with impulsive minds, such as underage children, might activate a time-traveling capability. The Butcher tricks an adult into carrying him into the Time Theater, and he joins Joggy and Hal in their viewing of a group of barbaric Scandinavian men from the Dawn Era. They watch as a sorcerer conducts some kind of spell with the Butcher egging him on. The Butcher's impulsive behavior combined with the sorcerer's ability to see into the future unlocks the bubble, and the sorcerer pushes the Scandinavian men through into the Time Theater. There, they begin to attack the adults present and attempt to kidnap a woman in the audience. The Butcher commands the uninjes to attack the men, and he stuns them with his use of the levitator to protect his head from the blows of their swords. The uninjes push the men back through the bubble, where they kill the sorcerer and the interpreter closes the bubble. Its automatic safeguards have failed, and the Butcher has saved the day."}
{"id": "51380_2", "pid": "51380_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Hal and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32093, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hal is one of the three boys who drives the narrative of the story; he is the oldest of the three, with the most experience and knowledge. He acts as a mentor to the Butcher and Joggy, the other two boys. Joggy is five, so he is able to go to the Time Theater for the first time, but the Butcher is not yet old enough. Hal tells the Butcher that his violent impulses will pass given time and conditioning, and tries to dissuade him from trying to enter the TIme Theater for the sake of safety. He is the one that wants to go to the theater, and asks the Butcher to walk with him. He scolds the Butcher once he reveals how he snuck into the theater, and is worried about the potential danger. Throughout the time in the theater, it is Hal who explains how the different beings in the society fit together, and the technology (and theories) around the Time Bubble, though the electronic narrator in the viewing box at the theater also helps fill in some details. Throughout the story more broadly, Hal maintains a patient tone with the Butcher, as he tries to be very understanding about his youthful inclinations towards violence, admitting his past urges but pointing towards positive change towards a more calm mindset. "}
{"id": "51380_2", "pid": "51380_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Hal and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32093, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hal is Butch and Joggy\u2019s older friend. He knows a lot more about the Time Bubble and pre-civilization than his younger friends do. Hal is reasonable, patient, and conditioned by the society he is a part of. He agrees with the rules that govern his existence and understands the key differences between pre-civilization and now. Hal is kind to Butch even when he rebels or tries to act like he knows better than everyone else. When Butch tells his friends that he will start wars when he serves as World Director, Hal responds by telling him that everyone thinks that at his age. Hal is confident in his knowledge of the world and society and does not get frustrated with Butch\u2019s fantastical ideas. \n\nHal enjoys his trips to the Time Theater and it\u2019s his suggestion that convinces Joggy and Butch to go see the Time Bubble. He thinks that the Scandinavian warriors sound interesting. He agrees that Butch should walk him and Joggy there, but he is certain that Butch will not be allowed into the theater. Hal is convinced that an usher will stop Butch from entering, and he believes that allowing someone under the age of five to enter the sacred hall could be dangerous. \n\nHal tries to answer all of Joggy\u2019s questions about the Time Bubble, but the truth is he doesn\u2019t understand a lot of the mechanisms behind the mysterious machine. He is a little bit embarrassed when the interpreter has to keep responding to Joggy throughout the show. Hal is truly alarmed when Butch shows up unexpectedly in the transparent cubicle. He thinks it is immoral and wrong to convince the usher that he is older than he truly is, and he worries that there will be severe consequences for his actions. When the Scandinavian warrior comes out of the Time Bubble and becomes violent, Hal immediately blames Butch for the glitch. He is a rule follower, and regardless of the fact that Butch saved the day, he remains upset and angry at him for breaking protocol in the first place. \n"}
{"id": "51380_2", "pid": "51380_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Hal and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32093, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hal is an older boy in the story, and he likes to remind his younger friends of his age and wisdom. He is more mature and sees the reasoning behind a lot of the rules that frustrate Butch, but his constant refrain of telling Butch that he\u2019ll feel differently when he\u2019s older only serves to irritate the younger boy and make him want to act out even more. Hal tells Butch that it\u2019s dangerous for under-fives to be in the Time Room, and he grows increasingly frustrated with and anxious about Butch\u2019s behavior when he lies his way in and starts messing with the Time Bubble. \n"}
{"id": "51380_2", "pid": "51380_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Hal and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32093, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hal is the oldest of the three friends, and he seems to understand the most about how the Time Theater functions and how the bubble works. Whereas Butch is impulsive, impatient, and wants to use violence to solve problems, Hal is more adjusted to the standards of the post-violence society. He offers wise counsel to Butch, who resists him at every turn, and he educates Joggy, who is more eager to absorb the lessons he imparts. Hal contrasts pre-civilization with the current world they live in and suggests that with age, Butch will also understand the necessity of removing violence from the equation when it comes to resolving conflict. "}
{"id": "51380_3", "pid": "51380_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of technology in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32095, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There are two major types of technology highlighted in the story: the first is the mechanical kind that allows for hovering travel, the development of uninjes, and the systems in place in the theater like the ushers and the protective mechanisms. The other major thing that could be categorized as technology is the Time Bubble itself; it acts as a form of entertainment but also as a warning to avoid the habits of people of the past. Focusing on the engineering technology that does not directly relate to potential time-travel, it is strongly hinted that the children in the story might be partly mechanical themselves, though this is not clarified. It is pointed out that there are \"adolescers\" and \"kinderobots\", which could be referring to the age groups of these children, and the dogs that follow the people around are also technological creations. The \"uninjes\" are like dogs, and are built to have canine reactions to be as close to real dogs as possible, but cannot be harmed and in the end are still collections of circuits with a battery and molded plastic. There are a number of pieces of technology in the theater, including forcefields used by ushers to block children who are too young to enter, and a number of safeguards like forcefields to protect people inc ase something went wrong with the Time Bubble. The bubble itself is a marvel of technology but nobody understands exactly how it works. Most of the discourse surrounding this is about the theories of time travel. "}
{"id": "51380_3", "pid": "51380_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of technology in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32095, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The technology in this world helps the children and people from getting injured. The boys use metal harnesses, levitators, and the hemisphere repulsor to keep them from hitting their bodies against trees, the ground, walls, or anything else that could potentially inflict pain. These technologies create an invisible shield around them and gently bounce them away from objects. \n\nThe Time Theater is a very important place that houses the society\u2019s Time Bubble, their most prized possession. It allows the adults to feel like gods because they are able to look back at any time or place and recognize how much their society has improved from simpler times. Upon entering the theater, Hal and Joggy feel a shock of electricity. Butch, however, is repelled by an invisible wall that knows he is not yet of age to enter the sacred space. There is also technology to keep the children separated from the adults in the theater. \n \nThe electronic interpreter in the theater helps the audience members understand what it is they\u2019re seeing and how the machine works. It is capable of hearing the audience members\u2019 questions and it quickly provides answers. \nThe Time Bubble is supposed to keep everything, even light, from entering the theater. It is only supposed to give viewers a look into the past, not a real experience. Some scientists in the society believe that the Time Bubble uses real peoples\u2019 memories to time travel. The Time Bubble malfunctions and allows the Scandinavian warriors in the Bubble to enter the theater. The men from the past are shocked when they see that Butch is protected by an invisible shield and the uninjes are incapable of being injured the way real dogs would. \nThe society\u2019s new technology saves the audience members\u2019 lives from a real attack from people of the past. Even when their technology malfunctions, they are able to protect themselves from the swords and wolvish dogs. \n"}
{"id": "51380_3", "pid": "51380_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of technology in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32095, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Technology is a huge part of this society, as it prevents bloodshed and is central to their way of life. Hal mentions fear houses and death games, as well as the invincible robot dogs known as uninjs. He explains that over time humans have been conditioned to reject violence. He also mentions a Space Fleet that they rely on in case of an outside attack. This society has also created a setting that is difficult or impossible to tarnish or disrupt. The children use levitators to \u201cswim\u201d through the air, and the Time Bubble is used as a source of historical exposure (and possibly propaganda). Until Butch is able to use the Time Bubble for actual space travel, the primary role of technology in this society seems to be to maintain peace, pleasantness, and control. \n"}
{"id": "51380_3", "pid": "51380_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of technology in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32095, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Technology plays an important role in the story, particularly as a buffer against violence in the new civilization as well as a window into the pre-civilization era. The boys use special levitation devices to swim through the air; these devices also release a kind of repulsor shield that protects them from running into things while they're swimming such as trees. The Butcher later utilizes this technology to protect himself against the sword attacks of the Scandinavian men when they are pushed through the bubble into the Time Theater. The uninjes are robotic canines that cannot be hurt and are programmed against hurting humans themselves. However, they also protect the humans against the attacks of the Scandinavian men later in the story. The Time Theater utilizes time-hole technology to open windows into previous eras for observation and study, and the interpreter intuits viewers' questions and answers them in real-time. The \"usher\" is a kind of force field as well, which has the ability to determine a person's age as they attempt to pass through it. All of this technology is imperfect, and, as the Butcher later demonstrates, malleable if in the hands of someone with impulsive instincts."}
{"id": "51380_4", "pid": "51380_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the structure of the society in this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32099, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This society is organized around a reconditioning of thoughts that happens as children transition into adulthood, starting at age six. Adults who have already been reconditioned are passive and polite members of society, who supposedly do not have traces of violent tendencies anymore. Before this, however, there are a few levels of separation from the rest of the society. Five year olds are allowed to go to the Time Theater to view whatever is showing through the Time Bubble, a view into other societies throughout time, but anyone younger than five is not allowed. This is presumably because of safety concerns--Hal thinks that young children are a nuisance to adults in these settings. The society has a number of systems in place specifically for these younger children who have not yet been conditioned. There are things called death games and fear houses, which we do not see details of in this story, that are meant to clear out the childrens' emotional space. It also seems that uninjes, the robotic dogs that the boys have, are also for this purpose: Hal says that they are part of the society's options for letting kids work out their ruthless and inconsiderate impulses. These impulses are restructured when they are aimed at other people, but violent alien beings and viruses or other medical concerns are still considered threats worth responding to in full force. The particular focus on avoiding violent patterns seen in other civilizations is highlighted by the grand nature of the Time Theater, and its position at the end of a major street in a large public park."}
{"id": "51380_4", "pid": "51380_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the structure of the society in this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32099, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In \u201cTime in the Round,\u201d the society is structured around perfection. Small children are given breakables, and those items are the only things that are physically capable of being broken. There are dirt-pens for kids to play in, and besides those areas, children are incapable of becoming dirty. The dirt-pens are only available to children aged 2 and younger. The society\u2019s dogs, uninjes, are programmed not to bite or hurt the people, even when they are hit or stabbed themselves. They do not react like normal canines. \n\nYoung children are considered to be self-centered and ruthless, and they are provided with death games and fear houses to get out their emotions and prepare to be conditioned as adults. When children turn six years old, they feel differently than they did before. They are ready to enter the Time Theater and view the Time Bubble. They are taught about pre-civilization and the important differences between their own society and the past. They learn how to reject violent solutions to problems and live in peace. \n"}
{"id": "51380_4", "pid": "51380_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the structure of the society in this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32099, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The structure of society is based on age, and very specific behaviors are allowed and prohibited at different ages. Very young children are allowed to play and get dirty, but after a certain age they are no longer allowed to do so. Certain ages are considered too young for certain ideas, and aren\u2019t allowed in the Time Building or are only allowed in certain parts of it. Younger children are sometimes called \u201ccubs\u201d, and it seems to be commonplace for older members of society to treat younger members with sweet derision. This society puts a strong emphasis on maturity and carefully controls what people are allowed to do at what ages and when they are allowed to learn concepts or do activities. The core principle is nonviolence but the results are near-total uniformity and strict constraints. \n"}
{"id": "51380_4", "pid": "51380_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the structure of the society in this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32099, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The society the main characters inhabit is post-violence. While children below five are given uninjes, death games, and fear houses in order to clear their emotions, adults are systematically re-programmed to believe that violence has no place in this new society. While violence is never used to resolve conflicts between humans, the Space Fleet will still use violence in defense against alien enemies. There are a number of protections in place to prevent violence upon humans from repulsor shields to the protective uninjes. The bubble at the Time Theater offers adults and those with the appropriate mental facilities a view into the pre-civilization world so that they may learn from the past and understand why a lack of violence became necessary in the new society."}
{"id": "51380_5", "pid": "51380_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what \"pre-civilization\" means in the context of this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32115, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The term pre-civilization points to anything that has a sense of violence or chaos in the lives of adults. For instance, raised voices and people talking over each other is considered pre-civilization, but so are violent wars. The society is built to get rid of these tendencies in children and recondition them as adults to be calm and peaceful members of society. When the Butcher is referred to as looking pre-civilization at the beginning of the story, it is because he seems to be up to something he isn't supposed to do, as he is potentially hurting or controlling Brute in some way with the use of a metal tube. "}
{"id": "51380_5", "pid": "51380_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what \"pre-civilization\" means in the context of this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32115, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In \u201cTime in the Round,\u201d the society is structured around perfection. Small children are given breakables, and those items are the only things that are physically capable of being broken. There are dirt-pens for kids to play in, and besides those areas, children are incapable of becoming dirty. The dirt-pens are only available to children aged 2 and younger. The society\u2019s dogs, uninjes, are programmed not to bite or hurt the people, even when they are hit or stabbed themselves. They do not react like normal canines. \n\nYoung children are considered to be self-centered and ruthless, and they are provided with death games and fear houses to get out their emotions and prepare to be conditioned as adults. When children turn six years old, they feel differently than they did before. They are ready to enter the Time Theater and view the Time Bubble. They are taught about pre-civilization and the important differences between their own society and the past. They learn how to reject violent solutions to problems and live in peace. Even yelling is considered a pre-civilization act. When Butch enters the Time Theater and tries to get the Scandinavian warrior\u2019s attention, he is using someithing called a \u201cpre-civilization voice\u201d. The Time Bubble is a tool that society uses to remind its current citizens what humans used to act barbarically, and that is not longer appropriate. \n"}
{"id": "51380_5", "pid": "51380_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what \"pre-civilization\" means in the context of this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32115, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Pre-civilization seems to refer to the society that we know, and any society that predates the decision to make violence impossible and to control all aspects of societal behavior. Hal describes the process of conditioning humanity to reject violence in all forms, and pre-civilization points to a time before that process was undertaken. For example, Butch is referred to as \u201cpre-civilization\u201d when he continually abuses an uninj at the beginning of the story, because he is behaving in a violent way. He is described this way again at the end of the story when he is shouting battle orders. \n"}
{"id": "51380_5", "pid": "51380_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTIME IN THE ROUND\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!\n \n\n \n From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.\n \n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.\n \n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n \n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n \n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n\"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\n \n \n\n \n The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n \n Butch yawned.\n \n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.\"\n \n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy\u2014and you, too, Hal\u2014when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n \n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n \n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n \n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen\u2014and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj\u2014it's contraprogrammed.\"\n \n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.\n \n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n \n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n \n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n \n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.\n \n \"Aw, quit it, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n \n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n \n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\n \n \n\n \n He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n \n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?\"\n \n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.\n \n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.\"\n \n \"I mean if you could hurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n \n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut up\u2014I want to think.\"\n \n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n \n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n \n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n \n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet you didn't.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n \n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n \n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.\"\n \n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n \n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n \n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n \n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater\u2014you're not old enough yet\u2014so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n \n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n \n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n \n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?\"\n \n \n\n \n The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n \n Butch scowled.\n \n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n \n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n \n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.\"\n \n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n \n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n \n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n \n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n \n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.\n \n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.\n \n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.\n \n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n \n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n \n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\n \n \n\n \n It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.\n \n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.\n \n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n \n \"I know ,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n \n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n \n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n \n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n \n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n \n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies.\"\n \n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n \n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n \n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n \n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n \n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier\u2014like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n \n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.\n \n \n\n \n Hal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n \n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old.\"\n \n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it\u2014something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n \n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement.\"\n \n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you.\"\n \n \"Shut up\u2014I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.\n \n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.\n \n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.\n \n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n \n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n \n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n \n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n \n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.\n \n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher.\"\n \n \n\n \n But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.\n \n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n \n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.\n \n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.\n \n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.\n \n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\n \n \n\n \n The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.\n \n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.\n \n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n \n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor\u2014long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\n \n \n\n \n Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n \n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though.\"\n \n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future.\"\n \n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n \n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way\u2014for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n \n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped\u2014and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n \n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014er\u2014you see, Joggy\u2014\"\n \n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\n \n \n\n \n As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.\n \n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n \n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice cut in.\n \n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n \n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n \n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's\u2014\"\n \n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n \n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them.\"\n \n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n \n \" I like this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n \n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n \n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n \n \"But how did you get in\u2014Butcher?\"\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse\u2014I kind of tried to get up and fell down again\u2014so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher.\"\n \n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n \n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.\n \n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.\n \n \"Those big dogs\u2014\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and\u2014\"\n \n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n \n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a\u2014uh\u2014\"\n \n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling\u2014just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.\n \n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true\u2014and no evidence for it has ever appeared\u2014there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction.\"\n \n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n \n \n\n \n \"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n \n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n \n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n \n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.\n \n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n \n \"Hah!\"\n \n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.\n \n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n \n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n \n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n \n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n \n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.\n \n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n \n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n \n \"Oh, boy !\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n \n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n \n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n \n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the safeguards!\"\n \n \n\n \n The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.\n \n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n \n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n \n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.\n \n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.\n \n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\" the interpreter enjoined.\n \n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n \n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.\n \n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n \n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey, you! You quit that!\"\n \n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n \n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.\n \n \n\n \n The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\n \n \n\n \n Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight\u2014and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n \n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n \n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.\n \n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n \n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n \n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n \n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.\n \n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.\n \n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\n \n \n\n \n The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.\n \n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n \n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n \n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.\"\n \n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.\n \n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what \"pre-civilization\" means in the context of this story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32036, "query_start_index": 32038, "query_end_index": 32115, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Pre-civilization primarily refers to the time before the post-violent society where the central action of the story takes place. They are able to view this era by using the time-hole technology of the bubble on display at the Time Theater in the Peace Park at the end of the Avenue of Wisdom. \"Pre-civilization\" is characterized by famous historical figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Tamerlane--individuals that the Butcher idealizes for their use of violence in resolving conflict. The climax of the story revolves around a viewing of Scandinavian men of the Dawn Era gone wrong when the simultaneous workings of a sorcerer and the Butcher's impulsive mind allow the Scandinavian men to pass through the bubble into the Time Theater. The ensuing battle highlights the barbarism of the Dawn Era--they use swords and real dogs in battle; it also demonstrates the Butcher's ability to weaponize technology meant to oppose violence as a way to protect this new society."}
{"id": "62997_1", "pid": "62997_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "It\u2019s the year 819, and a man named Ryd Randl who lives in Dynamopolis, a city in North America, goes to a dive bar. The place is crowded with many men because Dynamopolis is experiencing a power shortage, and they would freeze outside. Burshis, the owner of the bar, gives Ryd a free drink and explains that a ship from Mars just brought power back. He is expecting there to be a big boom in the economy soon, which will lead to jobs for people like Ryd. Ryd is not easily convinced of this good news. \nThe ugly and tall man sitting next to Ryd recognizes him. Once outside, Mury introduces himself and asks Ryd if he wants to make some money. He explains that he can offer Ryd a comeback. Ryd has been jobless for ten years, but before that he was a helio operator. Since then, Mars has become fully independent, and all the work moved there. Mury says that he is working for the hundreds of men who have been put out by the corrupt government on Mars. Although Ryd and all the other Earthmen have been told that the new power cylinder being installed will create jobs and bring back the power, Mury argues that isn\u2019t truly the case. He insists that Earthmen are essentially slaves to Mars\u2019s landowners, and in order to stop that from happening, they must stop the power cylinder from landing on Earth. \nThe two men arrive at Pi Mesa, and Mury kills a guard. Ryd steals his clothing and his flame pistol so that they can get on the ship unnoticed. Ryd must pretend to be a guard escorting Mury, the Poligerent of Dynamopolis aboard the Shahrazad. The two men sneak into the controlled area through a metal door, make it to the Communications Tower, and speak with a guard. Mury offers to show his credentials as Poligerent, and surprises the guard with a punch to the gut. Mury takes the officer\u2019s gun, points it at him, and demands he accompany them. \n\nRyd nervously points his flame pistol at the guard and drops his weapon. The weapon goes off and its flame hits some machinery. This gives the pilot pause, and Mury hurries to the control room and takes over the situation. There are three workers there who become his hostages. He explains to the men that he\u2019s taking Shahrazad into space to meet the power shell. \n\nWhen the ship takes off, Ryd passes out from the pressure of the acceleration. When he wakes, Mury assures him that they are on the right path, somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. However, Mury quickly finds out that his masterful plan has been foiled when one of his prisoners, the astrogator, informs him that a ship named the Alboroak is approaching, and it\u2019s about to intercept them. \n"}
{"id": "62997_1", "pid": "62997_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with the landing of a Martian ship on Earth, where electrical power has reached a critical shortage. The Martian ship reportedly carries a power cylinder that will restore power on Earth, enabling businesses to reopen and people to regain their jobs. Ryd Randl sees the ship landing just before he enters the Burshis\u2019 Stumble Inn which has power and where many men are staying to keep from freezing to death outside. Ryd lost his job ten years ago, and apparently, he has asked for loans from many people in the bar because they will not look him in the eye. The bar owner gives him a free drink but refuses to offer him a loan if Ryd asks him for one. A stranger approaches Ryd and seems to know, although Ryd does not know the stranger. The stranger asks Ryd to step outside with him and offers Ryd a way to make money. The stranger\u2019s name is Mury, and he is a Poligerent. Mury claims to be working for all the Earthmen who lost their jobs when the government made a deal with Mars. The Martians have sent a power cylinder to Earth that is supposed to restore power to Earth; however, Mury explains that the people who rule Earth\u2019s nations have sold the planet in exchange for the device because Earth will become a colony of Mars. He claims that the Martians view Earth as a ready labor pool of slaves. Mury wants Ryd to help him prevent the power shell from reaching Earth. Ryd doesn\u2019t want to agree to help but knows that if he doesn\u2019t, Mury will kill him.\n\tMury and Ryd go to the airstrip where the Martian ship and its township have landed. Mury kills a guard and orders Ryd to don the uniform; he plans for Ryd to act as his escort to the towship so that he can go aboard. In their guises, Ryd and Mury make their way to the township unaccosted until one guard becomes suspicious and confronts them. When Mury offers to show him his credentials, Mury hits him in the stomach and brings him aboard the towship. The pilots and an astrogator are in the cockpit when Mury enters and sends the pilots out. The ship takes off, and when it nears the orbit of the Moon, Ryd comes to and asks where they are. Mury and the astrogator notice a bright light on the radar screen which indicates a ship. The astrogator claims it is a ship on a diplomatic mission for Mars, but Mury claims it is a warship because of its speed. He says the ship is looking for them and will intercept them in twenty minutes.\n"}
{"id": "62997_1", "pid": "62997_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Some time in the future, Earth has sold the planet to Mars and become a colony of the Red Planet. This causes unrest for laborers who feel Mars is allowing Earth to degrade so that they can export human labor to Mars at very low cost. In the city of Dynamopolis, their main industry is distributing power, which once made them the power center of North America. \n\nThere is a spaceport, Pi Mesa, that receives essential supplies for Earth to continue existing, such as the power cylinder send from Mars as aid to Earth that is rumored to have landed there.  The power shell means an end to an electrical blackout the people of Earth are currently suffering from and the creation of jobs for the people of Dynamopolis.\n\nA scary figure named Mury meets Ryd Randl, a helio operator currently out of work, at the Stumble Inn bar in Dynamopolis. Mury forces Ryd into a grand plan to board a Martian spaceship on Pi Mesa to intercept a power shell in outer space and stop it from being delivered to Earth. Mury wishes to start a sort of revolution on Earth for it to become independent from Mars again, and describes that there is an \u201cinescapable conflict\u201d coming between Earth and Mars.\n\nMury and Ryd invade the Pi Mesa spaceport by killing a guard, and taking his clothes to disguise Ryd as a guard escorting Mury. This disguise works for a time until one of the Martian guards senses something is wrong and tries to stop them. They narrowly make it aboard a towship called Shahrazad which they believe is going into space to retrieve a power shell to bring down to Earth. They force the captain and crew into an airlock, except for the astronavigator named Arliess, who Mury forces to continue working by holding their planned course. \n\nWhen they blast off into outer space, Mury spots a Martian warship which may confirm his suspicion that Mars was about to begin a war with Earth. This is where the story ends.\n\n"}
{"id": "62997_1", "pid": "62997_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Set in the 800s 14,000 feet in the sky, Ryd Randl gets his first free drink of the month. He walks into Burshis\u2019 Stumble Inn where the bartender, Burshis, hands him a drink. There\u2019s buzz about the arrival of power from Mars. Dynamopolis has been desolate for at least a decade. This center lacked power and many lost their jobs over it. So, this new deal struck with Mars is giving people hope again. Randl laughs it off, however. He was laid off 10 years ago and gave up on finding another job.  \nThe beak-nosed, scary man next to him drags Randl outside, after paying for his drink and offering him money. He introduces himself as Mury and proposes a deal. A revolutionary, Mury wants to stop the shipment to protect Earthmen from becoming Martian slaves. He needs Randl\u2019s help, and he\u2019ll pay 50,000 credits. Ryd agrees, and they make the trek to Pi Mesa. Mury kills a guard on the way up, and Ryd changes into his clothes, flame pistol included. Now Mury will pretend to be a Poligerent of Dynamopolis so they can board the Shahrazad. \nThey break into the spaceport successfully and continue on. Their disguises work for the most part, though Ryd\u2019s nervous behavior makes them suspicious. Making their way down the runways, they finally arrive at the Communications Tower. On the tarmac lay Shahrazad, but guards both human and robot were everywhere. They made it onto the airlock before another guard took notice. He rushes after them and asks them who they are. Mury turns and tells him his credentials, then offers to show him ID. He then punches him and disarms him. The guard comes onboard as their captive. At first, the switches don\u2019t work, but Mury calms Ryd down. When the central control panel is cut, then the ship will take off.  \nRyd is supposed to be covering the guard when he slips and drops his weapon. The guard picks it up but is soon defeated. Mury forces the young pilot, Yet Arliess, to take off, while he sends the other two men to the airlock. The pilot does as he says, and all is well until Mury notices something on the map. There\u2019s a bright light, one that wasn\u2019t there before. A warship was coming for them, and although Arliess tried to lie, Mury saw straight through it. \n"}
{"id": "62997_2", "pid": "62997_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place in Dynamopolis, a city in North America, in the year 819. The city is flooded with searchlights, although there is very little power to go around. The Terrestrials must gather at the local bar, Stumble Inn, if they do not want to freeze to death. At one point, Dynamopolis was a wealthy city, known as the Port of Ten Thousand Ships. About ten years ago, the Power Company of North America and the Triplanet Freighting Company were shut down, and the majority of the Terrestrials lost their jobs. The only people with political power are the Poligerents, and unless a Terrestrial knows one of them, he or she is likely left without a way to make ends meet. The Terrestrials were recently told that the power will be restored once the power shell is put on Earth. The air is thin, but the Terrestrials have become accustomed to it.\n\nPi Mesa is the spaceport that hovers over the city. There are still unused ships hovering there from the days where it was an important port with lots of action. Just outside of Pi Mesa there are hundreds of low buildings that are abandoned because they are no longer useful. They contain fuel pumps and servicing equipment, and they serve as a constant reminder of the life the Terrestrials once lived. \n\nWhen Ryd and Mury break into the land patrolled by the guards in blue in the spaceport, they find narrow passages, spiral staircases, and cool metal walls covered in dust. The Communications Tower is nearby, and it is guarded by signal-men.  The soldier robots that are on patrol are about as tall as the average Terrestrial, and they are scarlet colored. They are unarmed and are mostly there to scare intruders away. \n\nMury and Ryd aim to get on a ship called Shahrazad, which rests on the Number Two Runway, waiting for takeoff. When they enter the ship, they find that the cabin is very hot and full of dials and needles. There is a curved control panel in front, and the ship makes a humming sound because of all of the air-purifiers onboard. \n\nMars is an important setting in the story, although the characters do not actually travel there. Mars is almost airless, so it is very easy to run a helio-dynamic engine. On Mars, they use robots for labor, and due to a law that has been passed, Terrestrials are forced to stay on Earth. \n"}
{"id": "62997_2", "pid": "62997_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in the city of Dynamopolis on Earth in the historic year 819.  Dynamopolis was built to be the power center of North America. Earth is in a deep recession with many men out of work for almost a decade because Earth can no longer produce power for the whole planet. Ryd Randl sees a spaceship landing at the unused airstrip just as he enters Burshis\u2019 Stumble Inn. This bar is one of the few businesses with power and is filled with men trying to keep from freezing to death outside because it is freezing at an elevation of 14,000 feet. The bar owner expresses optimism for Earth\u2019s economy with the power cylinder from Mars allowing Earth to turn the power back on for many people. The people on Earth have endured years of unemployment and have lost hope after so many years. "}
{"id": "62997_2", "pid": "62997_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the future, Earth is a desolate planet reliant on aid from Mars to continue existing. The atmosphere seems to be controlled by technology, as there is reference to a \u201cman-made dawn\u201d rising over the desert. \n\nThe main settings of the story are:\n\nA dark, smoky bar at the Stumble Inn owned by Burshis, located in the city of Dynamopolis which was once the power center of North America.\n\nPi Mesa, a busy spaceport in the desert on Earth that has many runways and a Control Tower. It serves as a place for supply ships to land with aid from Mars. \n\nAboard the martian space towship called Shahrazad that blasts off from Pi Mesa and enters outer space. It has a small crew and is suggested to be a small ship used for towing other cargo.\n\n"}
{"id": "62997_2", "pid": "62997_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Saboteur of Space by Robert Abernathy takes place in Dynamopolis in the year 819. Dynamopolis was built to act as the largest power center in North America. But the real question was where they would put it. Humanity had already conquered and filled much of Earth\u2019s territory. So, they built Dynamopolis in the sky, specifically at an altitude of 14,000 feet. \nAround the early 800s, Dynamopolis took a turn for the worse. Despite being the largest power center in North America, Dynamopolis lost its power. Businesses, companies, and factories started shutting down and resources dwindled. Dynamopolis is now desolate and freezing, due to the high altitude and lack of power. The street lamps don\u2019t work and only a few businesses--including Burshis\u2019 Stumble Inn--are allowed to keep the lights and heat on.\n"}
{"id": "62997_3", "pid": "62997_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Mury handle himself throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mury is a tall and ugly man with a great deal of confidence. When he finds Ryd in the bar, he immediately asks him to step outside and confronts him with a proposition. He is not overly concerned about getting caught talking about rebellion, and he is resolute about his decision to try and take over the spaceship that is about to take off. \nMury immediately gains Ryd\u2019s trust when he sympathizes with him about losing his job ten years ago. They are on the same team, angry about the way the Terrestrials have been treated since all of the jobs moved to Mars. He is forceful with Ryd, and he stares at him intensely whenever he is questioned. Mury claims to work for all the men who have been disadvantaged by the corrupt government. He coldly tells Ryd that he means nothing to Mury as an individual, and he is only interested in saving the Terrestrials from becoming the Martians\u2019 slaves. He believes that Earth is about to become a colony of Mars, and he is willing to risk his life to see that plan foiled. \n\nMury\u2019s tough attitude and willingness to act is demonstrated when he kills a guard by crushing his skull. He is unbothered by the incident and sees it as his only choice. Later, he pretends to be Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis for a moment, only so that he can punch another guard in the stomach, take his firearm, and shoot him. \n\nMury is able to stay calm when Ryd loses his cool. Even when Ryd accidentally fires his weapon inside the central control panel room, Mury focuses on the mission at hand. When he finally takes control of the three men on board the Shahrazad and demands that they takeoff for Mars immediately, he is unfazed by their refusal. He snaps at the pilot and the other two workers and points his gun at them to indicate that he is dead serious about killing them if they do not comply. \n\nMury is so sure of himself that it comes as a big surprise when the pilot tells him that he must not have looked at the log for the day. The Alborak is on a diplomatic mission to Mars, and it is something that Mury overlooked. He does not realize that the ship is fully aware that the Shahrazad has been hijacked, and it\u2019s coming right for them. \n"}
{"id": "62997_3", "pid": "62997_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Mury handle himself throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mury conducts himself with confidence and the assurance that he is right and on the right side. When he meets Ryd in the bar, he immediately recognizes him and asks to speak with him. Mury is on a mission and believes it is one that will vindicate many Earthmen. Mury also understands Ryd, and when Ryd is reluctant to work with him, Mury offers him money which Ryd can hardly refuse after so many years of unemployment. Mury is sure that he is right and does not hesitate to use violent means to meet his ends. He believes the governments of the Earth\u2019s nations have sold out to the Martians and that the Martians will use the Earthmen as cheap slave labor. Mury often comes across as angry and upset at the agreement the government leaders made with Mars. Mury convinces the blond astrogator of the township to help him return the ship to space. When it becomes evident there is a warship moving toward them, he maintains his calm even though he estimates the ship will reach them in twenty minutes or less. "}
{"id": "62997_3", "pid": "62997_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Mury handle himself throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mury takes a certain level of control over Ryd at the beginning of the story by coaxing him to leave the bar and forcing him to perform his bidding by maintaining a fear that he will have Ryd killed if he does not obey.\n\nMury is not forthcoming with his plan, preferring to play a controlling mastermind role - only telling Ryd details as they are necessary for him to know. Mury is willing to kill to accomplish his plan which he does to obtain a guards uniform to carry out his plan.\n\nMury maintains a sense of control through the whole story until the very end when he unexpectedly sees a Martian warship which clearly startles him.\n"}
{"id": "62997_3", "pid": "62997_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Mury handle himself throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29875, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mury, which may not be his real name, is a revolutionary man. He makes himself clear at the beginning; he doesn\u2019t care about individuals, but Earthmen as a whole. With a bony face, large nose, and expensive clothing, Mury makes an impression. He\u2019s confident and sure of himself, until the last moment of the story when he is thwarted by the young pilot. \nWhen he picks up Ryd, he uses intimidation tactics and more to influence his decision. He killed one guard along the way up the mountain and possibly another one on the ship. He pretends to be a higher-up of society to sneak onto the ship and succeeds. He believes in Earthmen and revivifying Dynamopolis. He\u2019s driven by halting this power deal between Dynamopolis and Mars to prevent any Earthmen from becoming nothing more than cheap labor. \n"}
{"id": "62997_4", "pid": "62997_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are so many Earthmen desolate?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Earthmen are desolate because their ability to support themselves has been taken away by the people in power. Like many others, Ryd was a helio engineer, and he made a good living in the North American city of Dynamopolis. However, about a decade ago, all of the buildings were shuttered, and the Port of Ten Thousand Ships, Pi Mesa, was essentially closed. The people who live in Dynamopolis were actually luckier than other Terrestrials because theirs was the final port to close. \nThe people in charge discovered that Mars has a thinner atmosphere, and they decided to move all of the work to the red planet. However, they did not transport the Terrestrials to a new land and give them an opportunity to continue working. Instead, they created robots who could easily do the humans\u2019 jobs for a lot less money. \nElectricity is hard to come by on Dynamopolis, and the energy that is left goes to Pi Mesa. Although people like the local bartender, Burshis, believe the people in power when they say that energy will soon be restored when the power cylinder is brought to Earth, others, like Mury and Ryd, are much more skeptical. They see the writing on the wall: the Terrestrials will continue to be used and abused, and all of the much-needed resources will go towards Mars, the new frontier. \n"}
{"id": "62997_4", "pid": "62997_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are so many Earthmen desolate?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Many Earthmen are desolate because the economy is so bad. Many of them lost their jobs up to a decade ago and have not been able to find work since then. Many businesses are shut down since they don\u2019t have the power to operate. Many of the men in the bar must be homeless as Ryd thinks to himself that Burshis\u2019 bar is one of the few open places, and approximately half of the men inside are asleep on the tables or on the floor to get out of the cold so they don\u2019t freeze to death. The loss of power occurred because helio-dynamic engines worked so much better in the Martian atmosphere and because robot labor made Mars fully independent economically. Furthermore, the government issued the Restriction Act to keep Earthmen on Earth and prevent them from moving to Mars or elsewhere to seek employment. The men in charge of Earth\u2019s governments have also made a deal with Mars for the power cell to restore power to Earth, but in exchange, Earth will be a Martian colony, making Earthmen slaves to Martians for all practical purposes."}
{"id": "62997_4", "pid": "62997_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are so many Earthmen desolate?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "They do not have jobs and the planet appears to be totally reliant on the aid being provided by Mars. Since the planet Earth was sold to Mars, they have become a colony to Mars. Some people on Earth (represented by Mury) are of the opinion that Earth\u2019s government is not acting in a way that benefits their lives, thus leaving them in desolation because the current relationship between the planets allows Mars to pay people from Earth extremely low wages.\n"}
{"id": "62997_4", "pid": "62997_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are so many Earthmen desolate?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29859, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Although it was originally the largest power center, lack of resources, funding, and jobs have led Dynamopolis down a dark path. Many people were laid off as the power plants shut down, including the 809 shutdown of the Power Company of North America. \nThe space station, landing pad, and runway hovers above Dynamopolis. Pi Mesa is the only working spaceport in Dynamopolis. \nThe lack of power and the Restriction Act forced everything to stop. Earthmen weren\u2019t allowed to go to Mars, even though they had full economic independence and the space to support them. So, now Dynamopolis is making a deal with Mars: power for labor. After losing all their jobs (a power center with no power),  it was no wonder that the earthmen wound up in the situation that they did. \n"}
{"id": "62997_5", "pid": "62997_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the character of Ryd.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ryd is a resentful and skeptical person because he has been without a job for at least ten years. His only solace comes from drinking at Burshis\u2019 Stumble Inn, where he can pretend that no one knows him and have a nice chat with the bar owner. \n\nHe knows he was a good helio engineer, and he is fully aware that he did not deserve to have his job ripped from his hands. When the bartender suggests that he will have a new job soon, Ryd thinks to himself that anyone who wants to give him a job can screw off. He has been without one for too long to even know how to manage it. \n\nRyd is also skeptical of people around him. When Mury approaches him at the bar, he notices right away that Mury seems out of place in the way that he\u2019s dressed. He also gives Mury an attitude when the man starts a conversation with him. He has learned not to trust many people, so he acts contrary to his natural intuition when he listens to Mury and almost immediately believes he has his best interest in mind.\n\nRyd is not a trained spy or someone who has a lot of experience with committing crimes, so he is very out of place on his mission with Mury. He is jumpy, anxious, and concerned for his safety throughout the job. He is so uncomfortable holding a weapon that he actually drops his flame pistol in a control room and nearly starts a fire. He leaves the dirty work to Mury, and he does not offer to shoot anyone or engage in combat or do anything that isn\u2019t directly asked of him. Ryd goes along for the ride because he is afraid that Mury will kill him if he backs out of the mission, and he also realizes that Mury\u2019s plan may be the only thing that saves men like him from becoming slaves. \n"}
{"id": "62997_5", "pid": "62997_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the character of Ryd.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ryd is a man who lost his job a decade ago and still feels badly about it since he hasn\u2019t been able to find a job since then. He is somewhat angry about losing his job because it wasn\u2019t lost through any wrongdoing on his part but because he was a helio operator, and helios worked much better on Mars. He has a reputation now for asking people for loans, so when they see him, no one wants to look him in the eye for fear that he will ask for yet more money. When the owner of Burshis points out that the power cylinder from Mars will bring back jobs, Ryd acknowledges to himself that there won\u2019t be any jobs for him; he is out of the habit of working now. Ryd has a mostly fearful outlook on life now. When Mury wants to speak with him outside the bar, Ryd is suspicious and worries that Mury might be a police officer. Ryd also feels that no one is sympathetic with him; when he did try to get another job, he was turned down because he wasn\u2019t allied with the Poligerents. After Ryd mentions the power cylinder as the salvation of Earth, Mury lets him know that this view is based on lies because the deal is based on Earth becoming a colony of Mars. When Ryd is reluctant to help Mury, the mention of money helps sway him to help as does the thought that they will kill him now that he knows so much if he doesn\u2019t help. At the same time, Ryd wants to help Mury to win his approval. Ryd goes along with Mury\u2019s plans, not because he believes in the cause but because he is afraid. Ryd remains fearful and uncertain in each part of the plan as they carry it out, and he relies on Mury\u2019s calm, cool demeanor and assurances to keep from falling apart.\n"}
{"id": "62997_5", "pid": "62997_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the character of Ryd.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ryd Randl was a helio operator, who lost his job some time ago. He is struggling like many other people on Earth because of the black out power outages and inability to find work. His eagerness to get new work causes him to take risks, and get involved with Mury\u2019s revolutionary plan. Ryd comes across as a law-abiding Earth citizen who is deeply uncomfortable with the crimes Mury ropes him into, but goes along with them in order to be paid.\n\n"}
{"id": "62997_5", "pid": "62997_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSaboteur of Space\n \n\n By ROBERT ABERNATHY\n \n \n Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate\u2014and even the winner would lose.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n \n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up\u2014draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.\n \n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis' dive.\n \n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis' which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.\n \n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n \n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.\n \n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.\n \n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n \n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since\u2014\"\n \n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars\u2014the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town\u2014even for you.\"\n \n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man\u2014no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n \n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known\u2014an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n \n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.\n \n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n \n \" Huh? Why, yeh\u2014I guess so\u2014\"\n \n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n \n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking\u2014so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n \n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n\"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n \n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If you're a cop, say so!\"\n \n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd\u2014a chance to live again.... My name\u2014you can call me Mury.\"\n \n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.\n \n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n \n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n \n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn good one, too\u2014I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the physique for Mars\u2014I might just have made it then , but I thought the plant was going to open again and\u2014\"\n \n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence\u2014and domination. For power is\u2014power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n \n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the Power Company of North America\u2014the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n \n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n \n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n \n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury's thin lips.\n \n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd\u2014you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working\u2014the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.\"\n \n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n \n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in the arm\u2014no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and\u2014\"\n \n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n \n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n \n \"The power shell is aid, yes\u2014but with what a price! It's the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they're selling us out\u2014making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you? \" He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots\u2014cheap as slaves !\"\n \n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you want me to do about it?\"\n \n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n \n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n\"What's that mean?\"\n \n \"The power shell\u2014isn't coming in as planned.\"\n \n \"You can't do that.\"\n \n \" We can,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n \n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing certainly\u2014if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm\u2014that was We .\n \n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n \n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.\n \n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened....\n \n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n \n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would\u2014toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.\n \n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now. He was caught in the machinery.\n \n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State order had grounded all fliers in America.\n \n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've brought you this far\u2014you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n \n The rest of the way.\n \n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air, shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol, powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n \n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes\u2014when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad .\"\n \n For a moment Ryd felt relief\u2014he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long, low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n \n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light. He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a small, disused metal door.\n \n \n\n \n Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It seemed to be crying: run, run \u2014but he remembered the power that knew how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n \n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside, and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\n \n \n\n \n It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n \n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence, he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n \n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways\u2014no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis' glory\u2014stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships\u2014mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed\u2014huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n \n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them.\n \n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough. Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last, inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n \n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies, their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet. Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance\u2014watched boredly enough.\n \n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets\u2014the Shahrazad , panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n \n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be aboard the Shahrazad when she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n \n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n\"Martian soldier robots!\"\n \n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For God's sake, take it easy.\"\n \n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going\u2014out into space?\"\n \n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\n \n \n\n \n The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was\u2014as it came about\u2014just a little too late.\n \n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad's airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n \n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face, but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n \n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n \n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be\u2014\"\n \n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused, sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n \n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod with an appearance of brusqueness.\n \n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent, pointing at its licensed owner.\n \n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard with us.\"\n \n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway\u2014for he was still very sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n \n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable countersunk mirror of metal.\n \n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n \n Nothing happened.\n \n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up, the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\n \n \n\n \n Mury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said. Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n \n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets. Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n \n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n \n Ryd backed\u2014the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze\u2014and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n \n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning, back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch outside.\n \n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant, the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n \n \"You damned clumsy little fool\u2014\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then, while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the starboard airlock.\n \n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his little cell of steel.\n \n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond, youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with an astrogator's triangled stars which made him ex officio the brains of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship\u2014it can't be done any more.\"\n \n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half of it. But\u2014you will. I'll need you. As for your friends\u2014\" The gun muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n \n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor; the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n \n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship into space. On schedule and on course\u2014to meet the power shell.\" The flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you\u2014what's your name?\"\n \n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n \n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n \n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\n \n \n\n III\n  Shahrazad drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n \n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities\u2014and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.\n \n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.\n \n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n\"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n \n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n \n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n \n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.\n \n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.\n \n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n \n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n \n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n \n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner Alborak , out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars.\"\n \n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive.\"\n \n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.\n \n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us\u2014will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the character of Ryd.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29813, "query_start_index": 29815, "query_end_index": 29855, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ryd is an Earthman who has been out of work for the past decade. His struggles with finding another job, making enough money to get by, and general hardships have made him somewhat bitter and static. Ryd is first introduced on cold Dynamopolis when he\u2019s entering a pub, knowing he can\u2019t pay for anything. He\u2019s lucky to get his first free drink of the month, and he savors his alcohol. \nAlthough Ryd looked for a new job at first, he soon grew to resent the institution and men that had forced him out of his position. He was a helio operator, and a damn good one according to him, and enjoyed his job. Now, after being out of work for 10 years, he\u2019d rather stick it to the man than beg for a new position. \nThroughout his adventure with Mury, Ryd falters on the occasion. He is not cowardly, but he is certainly not as experienced or as dangerous as Mury. However, since Ryd has nothing to lose--truly, no house, no job, no family--he can do whatever Mury asks him to, though he will pester him with questions along the way. \n"}
{"id": "50923_1", "pid": "50923_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden and his lieutenant \"Split\" Campbell make up the first manned expedition from Earth to this particular planet, aiming to investigate a large silver river on its surface. The seemingly-endless silvery strip that traveled the planet's surface was unidentifiable as of yet. They see the river-like thing early on, but Campbell spots a humanoid through his telescope--this being is much like a human man, including the fact that he wore clothing. Captain Linden decides it's time for introductions, as if he senses he can trust this being, but they watch as a female and then many other people join the first man on the surface, seemingly coming out of an underground city. Linden and Campbell think their ship is out of sight, and watch a ritual that the man is performing to the setting sun. The crowd of people continues to increase, and Linden notices that the landscape is moving: trees are shifting in the ground. He and Campbell stay in the ship and observe the various types of clothing and the ritual itself, as well as the moving trees which seemed to be moving to attack the people. They are indeed warriors starting an attack, and started swinging weapons. Linden tells Campbell to start the siren on their ship to scare away the attackers, and the first man they'd seen, presumably the leader, starts towards the ship. Once they are close enough, it is obvious that the humanoids don't have eyebrows or eye lashes. Captain Linden hands the leader a medallion that plays a song, as a token of friendship. Tomboldo, the leader, starts a round of introductions through a lot of gesturing. Linden hopes to learn about the Serpent River through the people to understand its cultural significance, and these people start to ask about the siren noises. The warriors attack again and panic ensues, pushing the humans to use weapons this time. Gravgak, the guard who had been escorting the humans, is knocked down. As Linden tries to tend to him, Gravgak knocks him out with his club. Linden is unconscious for a few weeks, and Vauna, Tomboldo's daughter, spends a lot of time by the Captian's side. Linden reminds Campbell that they weren't allowed to marry anyone from this planet, but mostly in an effort to warn himself to be careful around Vauna. He learns that these people are called the Benzendellas. Tomboldo is baffled by the technology that the humans have, but Linden is not able to communicate his questions about the Serpent River. He sees Gravgak, who apologizes for the accidental injury, but from Vauna's reaction Linden is not sure if he is telling the truth. Gravgak insists on talking to Vauna in private, but Vauna's father calls them back. It is Tomboldo's thanks to the humans that gives a glimpse into the meaning of the Serpent River: he says the humans will ride with them on the rope of life, which they call Kao-Wagwattl."}
{"id": "50923_1", "pid": "50923_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story relates the experience of two agents who travel to an unnamed planet for Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions (EGGWE). An unmanned camera has brought pictures from the planet back to Earth, showing two features of particular interest: 1) a human-like species, the Benzendella, living there, and 2) a rope-like, silvery undulating river. Captain Linden is the commander of the mission; his lieutenant is \u201cSplit\u201d Campbell. After traveling millions of miles to reach the planet, the men land and use their telescope to check their surroundings before alighting from the spaceship. They see the river and the human-like beings who look like human ancestors from a million years ago. As they watch, the leader of the humans seems to perform a kind of ritual, but then, Linden notices some trees moving uphill and watches in horror as warriors toss the trees aside and launch an attack on the humans using clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. To avert a massacre, Linden orders Campbell to hit the siren, which startles the attackers so that they retreat. Linden and Campbell then approach the people and give the leader, Tomboldo, a musical medallion on a chain. Introductions are exchanged, and some of the humans make the siren sound, indicating they want to hear it again, but the attackers return. Linden throws a capsule bomb at them, making them fall back briefly, but they quickly resume their attack. Finally, Linden and Campbell throw fire at the attackers, wounding many of them, and they retreat. One of the Benzendella men who acts as a guard, Gravgak, is injured, and Linden and Campbell treat and wrap his wounds; when they finish, they use smelling salts to rouse him, and he jumps up swinging one of the clubs he has picked up. The rock on the end of it hits Linden, causing a head injury and knocking him unconscious. While he is recuperating, Tomboldo\u2019s daughter Vauna takes care of him, and when Linden regains consciousness, he falls in love with her and has to remind himself of Clause D of the EGGWE Code that restricts marriage between agents and natives. Gravgak visits him to say that he did not intentionally hit Linden with the rock, but Linden doubts his sincerity. Gravgak then orders Vauna to speak with him in private, but her father stops them to announce that the council has decided they will move back to the other part of their world. They will travel on the rope river and want Linden and Campbell to go with them.\n"}
{"id": "50923_1", "pid": "50923_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Jim Linden and \"Split\" Campbell travel to a planet previously photographed by unmanned rovers as representatives of the EGGWE, the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions. Thier purpose is to study new planets and forge peaceful relationships with native inhabitants in order to establish trade partnerships. The Keynes-Roy cameras had captured images of humanoid natives as well as a massive, silvery \"rope\" that appeared to move along the planet's surfaces, so Linden and Campbell hope to identify the \"rope.\" They station at a safe distance from it, since they are unsure of its purpose, and, during their observations, they witness a group of native Benzendella emerge from their underground city for some kind of sunset ritual. As the group gathers around their leader--a muscular individual clothed in a cream-colored robe and red headdress--Jim and Split notice a group of trees drifting slowly over the sand towards the Benzendellas. They quickly realize the trees disguise a hostile group intending to ambush the natives. When they throw off their disguises and begin to charge, Split triggers one of the ship's sirens, and the attackers retreat back to the trees. Jim and Split walk to meet the group's leader, Tomboldo, and they offer a gift as a gesture of good will. Tomboldo has a guard, Gravgak, protect them as they make their way back to the city, and Gravgak tells them to mimic the ship's siren in order to keep the attackers at bay. However, the antagonists attack again, and Jim deploys one of his capsule bombs. Gravgak retrieves one of the attacker's clubs and runs towards them. Jim cannot decide if this is a bold move to protect the Benzendellas or a kind of warning about Jim's weapons, which would reveal Gravgak's loyalties might not be completely steadfast. When Gravgak is injured in the ensuing battle, Jim and Split revive him, and Gravgak impulsively grabs the club again and whacks Jim with it, leaving him in a state of unconsciousness. For a length of time, Jim remains in this comatose state, drifting in and out of consciousness as Split plays records of the Benzendella language and Tomboldo's daughter, Vauna, helps nurse him back to health. During this period, Jim realizes he has developed strong feelings for Vauna, and she seems to share these emotions. He tells Split to remind him of the EGGWE's Code of Conduct which bars adherents from marrying natives on planets they explore. When he awakens, Gravgak apologizes although Jim suspects the apology is insincere, and that he is either jealous of his relationship to Vauna or he is, in fact, a traitor to the Benzendellas. Tomboldo announces that because of the threat to their people, they will use the silvery \"rope of life\" called Kao-Wagwattl to find another spot to live on the planet and bring Jim and Split with them."}
{"id": "50923_1", "pid": "50923_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden and his awkward and studious lieutenant \u201cSplit\u201d Campbell arrive as the first human expedition on a strange planet. They are members of the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions (EGGWE) and Split followed their rules dutifully. Thanks to photographs, they are aware that this planet is inhabited by human-like creatures and that there is a large, serpent-like thing running through it. They land on the planet and peer through the telescope. Soon, a man and a woman rise up from the earth and stand on top of the flat, empty rock to watch the sunset. They are joined by more and more people, around 40 eventually. Split and Linden watch in awe as the leader, a man in robes and a headdress, performs some sort of ritual. Linden notices that the trees are moving towards them, nothing too unusual. He\u2019d seen sponge-trees before on other planets. However, these trees were being used as a cover for an attack. A horde of naked warriors rushes out with clubs and circles the ceremony. Linden orders Split to hit #16, and a siren wails out from their spaceship. It shakes the warriors to their core, and they retreat. Split and Linden gather up their supplies and exit the ship. The leader, having noticed their ship during the wailing, makes his way towards them. With 10-minutes left on the wailing, Linden believes they should be safe, but they carry small bombs (specifically special-purpose capsule bombs) with them as well. \nAs they get closer, Split notices how human these creatures look, aside from the lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. Linden offers their leader a gift, a singing necklace in the shape of a coin that plays \u201cTrail of Stars\u201d when pressed. The leader introduces himself as Tomboldo, and each member follows. Gravgak is introduced, a large, muscular alien covered in green and black painted diamonds, and he is tasked with protecting Linden and Split. Tomboldo invites them underground, where they can speak safely. They agree, needing to know more about the Serpent River. \nThey start wailing, just like the siren, in the hopes that it would keep the attackers at bay. However, the sponge-trees started moving again and danger struck. Linden and Split threw their bombs at the warriors and took them down, but not quick enough. Gravgak was injured and lay on the ground. Split and Linden bandaged him, and when he woke up, he \u201caccidentally\u201d hit Linden over the head with his club. \nLinden is taken care of by Vauna, Tomboldo\u2019s daughter, and her assistant, Omosla. He was very injured, even needing surgery performed by Split. Eventually, his health is restored and he\u2019s caught feelings for Vauna, despite Section Four Clause D of the conduct of EGGWE. Vauna and Gravgak are potentially in a relationship, but Tomboldo does not approve. The Benzendella are sleep-singers and their song echoes in the night. Tomboldo invites Linden and Split to accompany his people on a journey to safety aboard the Kao-Wagwattl, or the Serpent River. "}
{"id": "50923_2", "pid": "50923_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gravgak and what is his importance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29858, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gravgak is a guard who serves under Tomboldo, the leader of the Benzendella people, and escorts the humans after they meet. He is tall and muscular, with piercing eyes, and his limbs are painted with diamonds in green and black. He is knocked down during the second attack, and when Linden tries to tend to him, Gravgak knocks him out with his club. After Linden comes to a few weeks later, Gravgak apologizes for accidentally knocking him out, but it's not clear if he is being sincere about it being an accident. Linden's suspicions primarily come from Vauna's reaction, but Gravgak seems to hold some power over Vauna and Linden is not able to learn what Gravgak's true intentions are. "}
{"id": "50923_2", "pid": "50923_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gravgak and what is his importance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29858, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gravgak is one of the native Benzendella people. He is a tall guard with green and black diamonds painted on his legs. Tomboldo, the leader of the Benzendella, relies on Gravgak to make sure the group can travel safely to their dwellings after the initial attack, but Gravgak is more interested in the siren and trying to communicate with Linden and Campbell. When the sponge-tree warriors regroup and attack again, he grabs one of their clubs and confronts them as they advance\u2014either rushing to fight them or to warn them to back away. When Linden and Campbell throw fire at the enemy, he is so close that the fire and blasts of rock knock him down. He looks suspiciously at Linden as he and Campbell minister to his wounds and use smelling salts to make Gravgak fully conscious, making him jump up while holding the club and sending the rock attached to the club flying into Linden\u2019s head. Several days later after Linden comes to, Gravgak comes to see him and tells him the blow to Linden\u2019s head was not intentional. Vauna appears not to believe him. As Gravgak leaves, he tells Vauna he wants to speak to her alone. Linden stops her until Gravgak yells at her, and she starts to leave with him; this time, her father stops them. Linden wonders if Gravgak and Vauna have a relationship, but he also considers the possibility that Gravgak is a traitor.   \n\n"}
{"id": "50923_2", "pid": "50923_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gravgak and what is his importance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29858, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gravgak is one of Tomboldo's most important guards. He is tall and muscular, and his legs and arms are covered with green and black diamond paintings. Jim notices his eyes first, which appear piercing and suspicious to him, and Gravgak continues to arouse his suspicions throughout the story. Gravgak keeps watch for the tree-disguised warriors and guards Jim and Split on their way back to the underground city. However, he shows signs of agitation and distraction and commands the two men to mimic the siren sounds along with the rest of Tomboldo's party. When the attackers once again descend upon their party and Jim throws a capsule bomb at them, Gravgak retrieves one of their clubs and charges. Jim interprets this behavior to mean one of two things--either Gravgak bravely defends his people or he intends to warn the attackers of Jim and Split's advanced weaponry. After another of Jim's capsule bombs injures Gravgak, Jim and Split attempt to attend to his wounds and resuscitate him. When he regains consciousness, he clubs Jim and knocks him out. After Jim recovers, Gravgak visits him to apologize, but Jim isn't sure if the attack was accidental, especially because Vauna doesn't seem to trust Gravgak. Vauna appears to be in some kind of relationship with Gravgak, whether as a lover or some kind of subservient. While this is not completely clear to Jim, he is certain that Vauna's distrust of Gravgak strengthens his feeling that Gravgak is a traitor."}
{"id": "50923_2", "pid": "50923_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gravgak and what is his importance to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29858, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gravgak is one of the main sources of conflict and betrayal in this story. Gravgak is a very large warrior of the Benzendella people. He is strong and muscular. His arms and legs are painted with green and black diamonds. When Captain Linden first meets him, he describes Gravgak\u2019s piercing eyes as suspicious. His motives are never truly known, but his actions betray him. \nAfter Linden and Split meet Tomboldo, Gravgak is sent to guard them. He rushes into battle and gets injured. Linden and Split heal him, but when he wakes up, he hits Linden over the head with a club. Whether or not he did that on purpose is up in the air. The injury Linden sustained required surgery and days of bed rest. It could have killed him. \nOnce Linden wakes up, Gravgak returns and aggressively demands Linden to get better. He claims that he did not mean to hit him on the head, but everyone doubts his sincerity and integrity. Even Vauna, Tomboldo\u2019s daughter and Linden\u2019s crush, does not believe Gravgak. However, she is bound to him in some way, perhaps by marriage, but her father comes first. Possibly a traitor, Linden will forever question Gravgak\u2019s actions. \n"}
{"id": "50923_3", "pid": "50923_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the siren?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29841, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When Linden and Campbell arrive at the planet, they are primarily interested in the snaking silver rope that travels around the continent like a river, but they notice some people seemingly coming from underground. As these people were performing a ritual, the humans noticed an impending attack from a different group, but didn't want to use weapons so they started a siren on their ship to distract the attackers. This siren did scare these attackers off for a while, and when Linden and Campbell started trying to communicate with the Benzendella people the only thing the Benzendellas could say was an imitation of the siren noise. It was this siren that saved the people from the initial attack, and thus made these people trust the humans, but was also the beginning of their attempts at communication. In an indirect way, using this siren is how the humans ended up with a chance to ask the Benzendella people about the Serpent River that they came to learn more about. "}
{"id": "50923_3", "pid": "50923_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the siren?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29841, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden and Split Campbell use the sirens to scare away the attackers in the sponge trees to protect the Benzendella people. Because the people on the planet don\u2019t have advanced technology, they don\u2019t know what causes the sound of the siren, and it startles them so much that they pull back their attack. Linden and Campbell likely avert a massacre because the attackers in the trees are armed with clubs and whips with stones tied to the ends; taking their quarry by surprise with these weapons would put them at a distinct advantage. The Benzendella were engaged in some type of ritual and were unarmed when the attackers surprised them. Once the Benzendella realize the two men were responsible for the siren that saved them from the attack, they are willing to meet them close up. When the Benzendella speak to them, they make the siren sounds and seem to want the men to cause them to sound again. When the warriors launch another attack, Linden and Campbell throw a capsule bomb at them, making them drop back again, but once again, they push forward. Linden and Campbell throw fire at the warriors, making the rock break and fly up and hit them. Some of the warriors are killed or disabled, and the rest flee. So the siren is the start of a friendship between the two men on the expedition and the native people of the planet.\n"}
{"id": "50923_3", "pid": "50923_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the siren?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29841, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When the tree-disguised attackers descend upon the Benzendellas, Jim orders Split to trigger the \"number sixteen siren\", which emits a loud wail and causes the attackers to retreat. Jim and Split set the siren to ten minutes as they begin their half-mile hike to meet Tomboldo and his party. This offers them some security as they walk in addition to their stash of capsule bombs. Fearing another attack, Tomboldo and his crew of guards and officials mimic the siren sound as they make their way back to their city in order to ward off their enemies. While the legitimate siren sound keeps the attackers away, the copycat sound made by Tomboldo's people does not fool them, and they attack once more. This gives Jim the opportunity to deploy his capsule bombs, and Gravgak's actions in response lead him to further question the loyalty of Tomboldo's guard. Jim also winds up in a state of unconsciousness as a result of the attack, and this is how he meets and falls in love with Tomboldo's daughter Vauna."}
{"id": "50923_3", "pid": "50923_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the siren?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29841, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The siren saves the lives of the Benzendella people. As the sponge-tree warriors attacked them, Captain Linden ordered Split to hit #16, the siren. The sound pierced the sunset and caused the warriors to retreat. After saving the Benzendella, Tomboldo is indebted to Linden and Split. He invites them to their home underground and eventually on a trip across the Serpent River. \nThe siren is the beginning of the relationship between the humans and the Benzendella. Their gratitude allows Linden and Split to become their friends and acquaintances. The siren also showed how vulnerable the Benzendella are to attack when on the surface of the planet. Later, the Benzedella attempt to mimic the siren in an attempt to keep the warriors at bay. \n"}
{"id": "50923_4", "pid": "50923_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Linden and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29870, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden is the leader of the first manned expedition from Earth to the planet that is inhabited by the Benzendella people. His sponsorship is from the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions, \"EGGWE\" for short. Because a previous rover had discovered a mysterious silver river and some humanoid creatures, Linden and his lieutenant were sent to discover more. He hoped that interacting with the humanoids would allow him to learn some cultural significance behind what he referred to as the Serpent River, which he also planned on studying scientifically. After he landed, while Campbell was monitoring the humanoids, he noticed that trees were moving towards the people, and sensed an incoming attack. He ordered Campbell to start a siren from their ship to distract the attackers, and later led the two of them to meet the local Benzendella people. He presented their leader with a token of friendship, a medallion that played music. As another attack started, and a guard fell, Linden tried to tend to the guard but was knocked out and did not regain consciousness for a few weeks. As he slowly healed and felt more normal, he had to warn himself to be careful around Vauna, the Benzendella leader's daughter, who had been watching him at his bedside. She was very beautiful, and he knew it was against mission code to marry locals. "}
{"id": "50923_4", "pid": "50923_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Linden and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29870, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden is the leader of the first expedition to the planet. The trip is sponsored by the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions (EGGWE). From images brought back to Earth by a roving camera, they know that humanoids live on the planet, and there is a huge rope or serpent-like object or creature moving continuously across the surface. He and Split Campbell cautiously land a good distance from the rope-like object in case it is dangerous. Although he is in command, Linden has a good sense of humor and likes to joke with and poke fun at Split; in fact, Linden is the one who gave him his nickname. Linden allows some gray area in following the Code, for example, encouraging Campbell to look through the telescope at the rope before Campbell has finished writing his reports. After exclaiming rather unprofessionally at what he sees, Linden \u201corders\u201d him to take it easy. The two men are on their first voyage together, and Linden has entertained himself on the journey of millions of miles by teasing Campbell. Linden has been to six other planets, but none of them had beings that were so similar to humans; the ones on the current planet look like the human ancestors from one million years ago, and Linden is very excited about this. Linden senses that the humanoids are friendly and trusts his intuition; this is why he decides to help them when the other group attacks them. He tries to befriend the leader by offering him a singing medallion on a chain, but what really impresses them is the way he and Campbell help them when the attackers return. After the battle, Linden is hit in the head by a rock attached to the club that Gravgak used when Gravgak jumps up after being roused to consciousness. Linden suffers a head injury and is unconscious for several days. While he is recuperating, the humanoid leader\u2019s daughter Vauna cares for him, and he falls in love with her. Linden reminds Campbell of Clause D of the EGGWE Code, which states that none of their agents can marry a native but then admits he is reminding himself of this, not Campbell. When Gravgak states he is ready to talk to Vauna alone, Linden reaches for her hand, letting her know his feelings about her. Her father orders them to come back to the group, and when Tomboldo announces the group is ready to move back to the other part of the world, he invites Linden and Campbell to go with them.\n"}
{"id": "50923_4", "pid": "50923_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Linden and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29870, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Jim Linden leads a fact-finding mission on behalf of the EGGWE to discover the identity of a large, silvery, rope-like entity on a planet earmarked for the establishment of an inter-planetary trade agreement. Jim and his partner Split work together to observe the object, and, while doing so, they meet the local people called the Benzendella. Jim is a calm and effective leader; he has captained six similar missions in the past and is experienced in interacting with native populations in order to establish strong relationships for the EGGWE. This experience comes to bear when a hostile group attacks the Benzendellas, and Jim uses this as an opportunity to assist them with his ship's siren. This interaction establishes trust with the Benzendellas, and he moves to deepen that trust by giving a peace gift-- a music-playing medallion. After Jim and Split help save the Benzendellas from a second attack and revive Gravgak when he is wounded, the Benzendellas provide Jim and Split a place to stay as Jim recovers from his own injury. During his state of unconsciousness, Jim learns the Benzendella language and falls in love with Vauna, Tomboldo's daughter."}
{"id": "50923_4", "pid": "50923_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Linden and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29870, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden is a member of the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions (EGGWE) and Lieteuant \u201cSplit\u201d Campbell\u2019s superior officer. He is a confident man and loves teasing Split. After having been on one expedition before, Linden and Split were ready to arrive on this planet and investigate the Serpent River. As they look out at the seemingly-barren world through their telescope, Linden notices people emerging from underground. He watches in awe as they all gather around one man and a woman, seemingly about to perform some sort of ritual. The shadows of the trees move, but he sees nothing abnormal about this. Warriors rush out of the trees to attack the Benzendella, so Captian Linden saves them by having Split press the siren button, #16. He uses the EGGWE code of conduct when addressing the leader, Tomboldo, and offers him a gift. They are invited underground to their home but are attacked by the warriors again before they can descend. Gravgak is injured, so Linden and Split try to take care of him. When he awakens, he smashes his club into Linden\u2019s head, possibly on purpose. \nLinden wakes, days later, underground with Vauna by his side. Vauna is Tomboldo\u2019s daughter, and Linden quickly develops feelings for her. The EGGWE code forbids its members to marry any natives, and he reminds himself of that. \nHe speaks with Tomboldo and Gravgak, the latter of which explains that it was an accident, though the look in his eyes and his tone of voice says otherwise. Tomboldo invites Linden and Split to join them on their journey aboard the Serpent River, as they travel across the planet looking for safety. \n"}
{"id": "50923_5", "pid": "50923_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Linden and his lieutenant \"Split\" Campbell\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29887, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Linden is a fairly relaxed captain who is ready to perform his mission to code, but is almost amused at his lieutenant's inability to stray from code. He calls Campbell \"Split\" because he does everything so by-the-book that if he were combing his hair down the middle, he wouldn't be surprised if he split the hairs in the middle of his head for perfect symmetry. They seem to work well together, and Campbell is dedicated to his scientific mission and reviewing reports, while Linden reminds him to look at the window at the world around them, which offers a nice balance to their progress. Campbell clearly respects Linden a lot, and Linden is always kind to him and not rude or condescending, which is important for team cohesion on a mission away from a home planet. "}
{"id": "50923_5", "pid": "50923_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Linden and his lieutenant \"Split\" Campbell\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29887, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden is the senior commanding officer of Lieutenant Split Campbell; however, Campbell is a much more by-the-book military man than Linden is. Linden has a sense of humor and enjoys teasing Campbell about his strict adherence to military standards and codes. He gives Campbell the nickname \u201cSplit\u201d because of Campbell\u2019s extreme attention to detail and teases that Campbell will split the hairs that pop up when he parts his hair. Linden wishes Campbell would lighten up a little and even orders him to relax. At the same time, Linden also knows that he can depend on Campbell to fulfill his duties. When the two agents witness the \u201ctrees\u201d moving toward the group of humanoids and realize they are actually warriors launching an attack, Split addresses Linden first as \u201cCaptain\u201d and then as \u201cJim\u201d as he worries about the group about to be attacked. Linden notices this and realizes that Split\u2019s formality drops when he is excited. The two men work well together, and Campbell seems to know what Linden wants from him without needing any orders. When Linden suffers a head injury after being hit by a rock, Campbell performs the surgery that relieves the pressure on his brain; he tells Linden he must get well, as if Campbell is counting on Linden both as a friend and an officer. As Linden realizes he is falling in love with Vauna, he reminds Campbell of the EGGWE Code Clause D, which prevents agents from marrying natives, and Campbell asks whether Linden is warning Campbell or himself. Campbell seems to be speaking to him as a friend by acknowledging that Linden has feelings for Vauna. At the same time, Campbell addresses Linden as \u201cCaptain,\u201d showing that their friendship does not place them on equal standing even though they are close enough to call each other by their first names.\n\n"}
{"id": "50923_5", "pid": "50923_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Linden and his lieutenant \"Split\" Campbell\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29887, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jim gives Campbell the nickname \"Split\" because of his meticulous attention to detail and his need for order in life. Split memorizes the EGGWE code and recites relevant sections throughout the story such as when Jim asks him to recall the clause about the ban on marrying any natives whom agents might encounter during inter-planetary expeditions. After Gravgak clubs Jim, Split performs surgery on him during his state of unconsciousness in order to relieve pressure on his brain and even brings him recordings of the Benzendella language so that he can learn to speak while he gathers his strength. Split also communicates with Omosla and Tomboldo during Jim's coma-like state, so that he can learn more about the Benzendella people and share about the purpose of their own expedition. Jim\u2019s more spontaneous, empathetic approach to leadership complements Split\u2019s rigid commitment to rules, and this makes them a strong and effective team."}
{"id": "50923_5", "pid": "50923_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SERPENT RIVER\n \n \n By Don Wilcox\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The Code was rigid\u2014no fraternization with the peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n \n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n \n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\n \n  something\n \n that crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n \n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain\u2014or a chain of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of solid substance.\n \n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the horizon.\n \n \n  What was it?\n \n \n \"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers. Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned) had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n(2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land, continuously, endlessly.\n \n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it proved to be some sort of vegetable\u2014a vine of glacier proportions\u2014or a river of some silvery, creamy substance\u2014we would move in upon it gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n\"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of split-hairs.\n \n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n \n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n \n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n \n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two, Order of Duties upon Landing: A\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See it?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from under its belly?\"\n \n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n \n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n \n \"No sir.\"\n \n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n \n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir. Any orders, sir?\"\n \n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n \n \"Thanks\u2014thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n \n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all, his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he required in his coffee.\n \n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits. Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n(our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"\u2014and the wide ears that stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n \n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n \n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n \n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny\u2014\"\n \n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n \n \"Yes sir.\"\n \n \"What sort of object?\"\n \n \"A living creature, sir\u2014upright, wearing clothes\u2014\"\n \n \"A\n \n  man\n \n ?\"\n \n \"To all appearances, sir\u2014\"\n \n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n \n \n\n 2.\n \n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when, looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n \n Walking upright!\n \n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n \n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man! Across millions of miles of space\u2014a man, like the men of the Earth.\n \n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of our Earth.\n \n A man!\n \n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n \n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n \n He might have been entirely naked.\n \n He was none of these\u2014and at the very first moment of viewing him I felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance\u2014but had my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n \n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n \n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or murderous.\n \n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my word for it, he's a friend.\"\n \n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n \n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n \n \"We're going to go\n \n  out\n \n \u2014?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n \n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n \n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n \n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground city\u2014though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n \n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n \n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n \n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\". They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a hike.\n \n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold, cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a circular mantle.\n \n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions, his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n \n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n \n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\n \n  moving\n \n .\n \n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n \n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees themselves were moving.\n \n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n \n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n \n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of the moving trees.\n \n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n \n \"Yes. The females\u2014I'm speaking hypothetically\u2014but they\n \n  must\n \n be females\u2014are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows. I wonder why?\"\n \n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n \n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n \n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope. Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other planets\u2014\"sponge-trees\"\u2014which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid no attention to them.\n \n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb. The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males and the soft curves of the females.\n \n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n\"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so they pad their elbows.\"\n \n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their shoulders.\"\n \n \"Are you complaining?\"\n \n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in calm, graceful gestures.\n \n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are moving in on them.\"\n \n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you ever see moving trees?\"\n \n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under cover. Look!\"\n \n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers\u2014how can we warn them? Oh-oh! Too late. Look!\"\n \n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors\u2014fifty or more of them\u2014with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n \n \n\n 3.\n \n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird clubs with a threat of death.\n \n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we were about to witness a massacre.\n \n \"Captain\u2014\n \n  Jim\n \n ! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n \n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had the same impulse as Campbell\u2014to do something\u2014anything! Yet here we sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n\"friends\" in danger.\n \n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n \n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n \n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\n \n  could\n \n drop his dignity under excitement\u2014his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he wanted any sort of split-second order.\n \n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n \n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n \n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n \n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n \n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n \n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life. It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept right on singing.\n \n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately, he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n \n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding places in the ground. But a few\u2014the brave ones, perhaps, or the officials of his group\u2014came with him.\n \n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n \n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I said. Together we descended from the ship.\n \n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first. We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively. We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n \n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the cream-and-red cloak.\n \n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces. Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n\"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n\"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very smooth\u2014handsome\u2014attractive.\"\n \n Then the siren went off.\n \n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in close.\n \n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear, dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to place the gift around his neck.\n \n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n \n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n\"Tomboldo.\"\n \n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then, as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of them. One was Gravgak.\n \n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n \n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.\n \n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose\u2014to understand the Serpent River\u2014would be forwarded greatly if we could learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and to map its course\u2014these facts were only a part of the information we sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE) for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n \n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent. Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests of Tomboldo.\n \n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with agitated jabbering:\n \n \"Wollo\u2014yeeta\u2014vo\u2014vandartch\u2014vandartch! Grr\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\"\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o,\" one of the others echoed.\n \n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\" we were all safe.\n \n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than a yowling siren.\n \n \"See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand. They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n\"\n \n  See\u2014o\u2014see\u2014o!\n \n \"\n \n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n \n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed. Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the air.\n \n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n \n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came forward, rushing defiantly.\n \n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as a\n \n  warning\n \n ! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these strange devils will throw fire at you.\n \n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders, thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip, zip\u2014BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were flattened\u2014and those who were able, ran.\n \n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to pick up their clubs.\n \n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of the party hovered over him.\n \n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages, and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to consciousness.\n \n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it\u2014and then blacked out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him\u2014apparently all by accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into my head.\n \n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n \n \n\n 4.\n \n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the weeks that I lay unconscious.\n \n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n \n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n \n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow penetrate my dream.\n \n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices of this new, strange language.\n \n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n \n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n \n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n \n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n \n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n \n \"One of them.\"\n \n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember\u2014\"\n \n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of Campbell came through insistently.\n \n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n\"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n \n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n \n \"Section Four?\"\n \n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed as binding\u2014\"\n \n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n \n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain Linden? Or are you warning\n \n  yourself\n \n ?\"\n \n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her\u2014yes, she must have haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's question. \"Myself.\"\n \n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna. The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning about the world into which he has been born.\n \n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together. Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to converse in simple words. And Vauna and I\u2014yes. If I could only avoid blacking out.\n \n I wanted to see her.\n \n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars. The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n \n I regained my health gradually.\n \n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are still weak.\"\n \n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep. Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n \n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me, faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless dreams.\n \n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n \n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n \n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n \n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will walk soon.\"\n \n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell each other.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\n \n  serpent river\n \n .\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\n \n  I\n \n made an eel-like motion with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain, the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and green diamond markings\u2014Gravgak.\n \n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n \n \"I get well,\" I said.\n \n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n \n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and started off. \"Get well!\"\n \n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n \n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n \n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n \n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n \n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master\u2014or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n \n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n\"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n \n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover\u2014or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?)\n \n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back.\n \n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling.\n \n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n \n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n \n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend\u2014\" he pointed to me\u2014\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget this kindness. When we ascend the\n \n  Kao-Wagwattl\n \n , the ever moving\n \n  rope of life\n \n , these friends shall come with us. On the back of the Kao-Wagwattl\n \n  they shall ride with us across the land\n \n .\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Linden and his lieutenant \"Split\" Campbell\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29791, "query_start_index": 29793, "query_end_index": 29887, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Linden and Lieutenant \u201cSplit\u201d Campbell have developed a very friendly relationship over the course of their two expeditions. Linden even nicknamed Lieutenant Campbell \u201cSplit\u201d for his diligent and dutiful ways. Linden constantly teases Split and pushes him to think outside the box and outside the EGGWE\u2019s code of conduct. They can easily rely on each other, as can be seen in battle and underground. Split throws his bombs when being attacked by the warriors, even though Linden didn\u2019t order him to do so. Despite being a very diligent traveler, he recognizes that in times of crisis it\u2019s better to just act. As well, when Linden was gravely injured by Gravgak, Linden performs surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain and help him heal quicker."}
{"id": "51336_1", "pid": "51336_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nIn 1953, an advertisement for the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth appears in magazines. The ad claims that POSAT is an ancient secret society looking for new members. Three individuals send away to receive a free booklet from them. Bill is a pharmacist who is down on his luck and out of a job. Elizabeth is a wealthy woman who lives with cats. Don is a research physicist who has a successful career and a wife, Betty. \n\nPOSAT sends Bill, Elizabeth, and Don three identical forms in the mail and asks for their responses. Bill is initially skeptical, but he hopes that POSAT will be able to turn his life around in some unexpected way. He answers the questions about his employment, religion, and finances. Elizabeth does the same enthusiastically. Although Don believes it\u2019s a scam, he can\u2019t squash his own curiosity, and he sends his answers in.\n\nIn return, Bill receives a pamphlet with vague descriptions for how to solve life\u2019s problems. He finds the material useless, but he isn\u2019t disappointed because he just landed a new job. Elizabeth discovers that she has been accepted into the society, and she must pay $5 a month. Lastly, Don receives a multiple choice exam, which he answers and sends back.\n\n\nDon receives a request to meet with the Grand Chairman at his work, and this surprises him because he never gave them his work address. He finds the warehouse and sees that it is windowless, rundown, and dirty. However, the waiting room contains beautiful rugs and paintings in ornate frames. He realizes that each painting is lit with a glowing tube that does not contain batteries, and he puts one of the lights in his pocket. It shocks him because his workplace is the only laboratory working on this exact product. He no longer trusts what is going on at POSAT and tries to leave, but the door is locked. \nDon is brought upstairs, and his fear increases when he looks into a high tech laboratory and sees scientists working on an atomic reactor. Dr. Crandon, Don\u2019s former professor, appears and introduces himself as the Grand Chairman. He tells Don that POSAT has been around for over four hundred years, and its founder invented the atomic reactor. He did not have the technology to build it, and he realized that humanity was not ready for such a weapon. He decided to share his knowledge with other geniuses and keep it all a secret. Their goal was to get humanity to a point where information could be shared without the threat of violence and death. Crandon shows Don the world\u2019s biggest computer, which is meant to learn humans\u2019 motivation. Don\u2019s test was put into the computer, and his responses indicate that he will join POSAT and be a valuable member. Bill was given a job to improve his life, and Elizabeth feels included and contributes financially. Don decides to join the secret society and work towards a more peaceful planet. \n"}
{"id": "51336_1", "pid": "51336_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Various advertisements have gone through various magazines for POSAT, the \"Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\", offering a booklet that can be requested in the mail. Various people sent for the booklet, including Bill Evans, a pharmacist currently without work, Miss Elizabeth Arnable, an eager woman excited to learn, and Donald Alford, a research physicist driven by curiosity. The three of them received an identical form in return, and each filled out the long questionnaire with a large amount of personal information. Donald's wife tried to convince him to fill the form out with false answers, but he was honest as the others were. A week after these questionnaires were sent, POSAT sent different envelopes to these three people. Bill Evans, for instance, received a standard pamphlet with metaphysical discussion. He was disappointed by this but was pleased to be starting a new job near the POSAT offices soon, which he did not realized was connected. Miss Arnable received several pamphlets and an offer to pay dues, which she did immediately. Donald Alford received a series of multiple choice questions about moral decisions surrounding potentially dangerous events. His answers got him an interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT, but it would be in the middle of a work day, almost a hundred miles away. Although he was surprised to have received the letter at his lab, because he had only given POSAT his home address, his curiosity drove him to take the interview. It took him some time to find the POSAT headquarters, hidden in the back of an alley, and he was struck by the elegance of the first room he was invited into. He was slightly taller than the people the room was built for, hitting his head on a light and having to bend over to look at paintings. He found an impossible-seeming lightbulb, that resembled a secret project he was working on but in later stages. He was locked in the room, but eventually escorted to see the Grand Chairman, passing over an incredible laboratory with an atomic reactor. It turns out the Grand Chairman was Dr. Crandon, Donald's mentor, which made Donald confused, as he had trusted Dr. Crandon but could not trust what was happening in the laboratory he had seen. Dr. Crandon explained that although most of their work was illegal, he considered it some of the most moral work being done. Dr. Crandon walked Donald through the history of the organization, waxing poetic about the founder's genius as a physical scientist and mathematician. He did not have the technology to act on his theories, but left enough information for people in the future to develop technologies, following what Crandon called the path to truth. The primary goal was for science to be used without disaster, and Donald struggles accepting this knowing that atomic bombs exist. The machine with which they were studying human motivation is what read the entry questionnaires. His curiosity wins and Donald joins the research group."}
{"id": "51336_1", "pid": "51336_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Three people separately read and react to an advertisement for POSAT, the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth, which promises secret truths that can alter the course of one's life. Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, finds hope in the promise of superhuman intervention to help pull him from his desperate financial situation. Miss Elizabeth Arnable, a cat enthusiast who doesn\u2019t read, connects with the advertisement's religious and mystical undertones since she believes her cats to be reincarnated family members. Donald Alford, a research physicist, is the most skeptical among them, and his interest in POSAT is purely scientific; he wants to determine POSAT\u2019s true purpose, and so he completes the autobiographical form all three of them receive in response to their individual inquiries for more information. The impractical, metaphysical pamphlet Bill receives in response to his form disappoints him; however, he also receives a job offer at a pharmacy attached to the very warehouse that also houses POSAT's headquarters. Miss Arnable receives a membership pin, several pamphlets full of hidden truths of ancient wisdom, and information regarding membership fees. Don Alford receives a questionnaire that appears to be some kind of personality test catered to him specifically, despite the fact he has thus far revealed nothing of his life to them. Don's wife, Betty, wonders if POSAT might be some kind of spy society. In response to his questionnaire, POSAT invites Don to their headquarters to meet with their Grand Chairman in order to conduct an interview prior to his membership acceptance. Don struggles to decide whether or not to attend the meeting, considering the headquarters is nearly one-hundred miles from his home, and the lab where he works typically frowns upon using work time for personal matters. However, he decides to go anyway, and he finds the headquarters is part of a massive warehouse that is also home to a printer's plant, upholstering shop, and a pharmacy where Bill Evans now works. A receptionist guides him to a waiting room, where he discovers a number of brightly-lit Renaissance-style paintings. When he accidentally dislodges a light tube, he realizes the technology keeping it lit resembles his own research back at the lab--research that has not yet been released for public consumption. When he meets the Grand Chairman, he begins to make sense of the true purpose of POSAT; the Grand Chairman is actually Dr. Crandon, a physicist whose research Don has admired for several decades. Dr. Crandon explains POSAT is a society started four hundred years ago by a genius mathematician and physical scientist whose knowledge and discoveries were so advanced and powerful, he felt they must be kept secret until the world was ready to handle them in a responsible fashion. He shows Don a large computing machine used to determine human motivations and predict their reactions, which had been used to assess Don's suitability for membership, and which will be used to contribute to the advancement of a peaceful society. Don agrees to join Dr. Crandon's cause."}
{"id": "51336_1", "pid": "51336_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "An ad was placed in the paper and several magazines throughout town, describing POSAT, the Pepetual Order of Seekers After Truth. It speaks vaguely about wisdom, changing your life, and mastering knowledge. Three people look at the ad in interest. The first is Bill Evans, a recently unemployed pharmacist, desperate for a miracle. He needs another job, a better life, so he responds to the ad as a last resort. The second is Miss Elizabeth Arnable, a cat-lady who loves the radio. And finally, Donald Alford, a physicist with a caring wife. He was reading a paper by Dr. Crandon, his former professor when he came across the advertisement. He responded simply because he was curious, and because their symbol piqued his interest. It looked almost like the Bohr atom of helium. \nThey all received identical booklets in the mail, promising the same stuff as the advertisement, but with a new form. All threw filled it out. Bill Evans took a while to do so, but he did so eventually with his desperation in tow. Miss Arnable wrote five pages, including the lives of her cats, and asked how much she would need to pay to be a member of POSAT. \nBut Alford was more skeptical, so he showed the booklet to his wife. She knew he was going to fill it out anyway because his curiosity would not be sated till he had an answer. He did just that.\nThe next mailings were completely different. Bill Evans\u2019 pamphlet was filled with vague and metaphysical realizations. But, the same day, he was miraculously offered a job at a wholesale pharmacy. Miss Arnable was accepted, sent pamphlets about cats, and asked to pay $5/month. After filling out a multiple-choice questionnaire, Alford was asked to come in for an interview with the Grand Master during his workday. The letter was sent to his office; the address he never revealed.  He took off the day to drive there and arrived at a small entrance down an alley near a wholesale pharmacy. He entered and climbed the stairs to the receptionist. She took his information then led him into the waiting room. Beautiful paintings lined the wall, lit up by radioactive, self-contained lights. He was in shock after making this discovery. His lab was working on such an invention, but failing at making the right material. He pocketed the light. \nThe receptionist led him across a balcony into the Grand Master\u2019s office. Below the balcony was a highly advanced laboratory. Equipment that had yet to be invented. When Alford entered the office, he realized the man in front of him was Dr. Crandon, his professor, and fellow scientist. He explains the history of POSAT, how advanced they are, and their current mission: to find out more about human motivation to solve world issues. Dr. Crandon shows him a supercomputer that is on the path to making this huge discovery. Alford joins POSAT. \n"}
{"id": "51336_2", "pid": "51336_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32767, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\u201cWhat is POSAT?\u201d takes place in an unspecified city. Three of the characters, Bill, Elizabeth, and Don, lead ordinary lives and hold typical jobs. Don is a physicist, and the laboratory he works at is located about 100 miles away from the POSAT headquarters. \n\nThe POSAT headquarters is the main setting described in the story. It is located at the end of an alley in an unassuming warehouse, next to a wholesale pharmacy, an upholstery shop, and a printer\u2019s plant. The building is almost entirely windowless, and the only sign that the secret society is housed there is the organization\u2019s emblem on its door. \n\nVisitors enter a dark room with a staircase. A buzzer goes off to let the employees of POSAT know that someone has arrived. The reception room is dusty and highly unimpressive. The wallpaper and rugs are worn out and gray, and the woman who works at the beat-up reception desk is average looking. \n\nThe next room that some visitors are allowed access to is entirely different from the first. There are gorgeous Renaissance paintings on the walls, framed with ornate gold decoration and lit up with individual lights. The rug is lush, and the room is impeccably clean. \n\nFinally, when visitors are invited to meet with the Grand Chairman, they must enter a balcony area located in the interior of the warehouse. There is a frosted glass door with the Grand Chairman\u2019s name on it. On the lower floor, there is a laboratory that is visible from the balcony. The lab contains advanced equipment that is not available anywhere else in the world. It also houses an atomic reactor that is shielded by a bluish-green invention that is about an inch thick The shield is semi-transparent but also incredibly strong. Beneath the balcony, down a steep flight of stairs, there is a gigantic computing machine. Everything that goes on in the POSAT building must remain confidential, and very few individuals are told the secrets of the ancient society. \n"}
{"id": "51336_2", "pid": "51336_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32767, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The primary setting in this story is that of the POSAT headquarters. Hidden in a back alley in a warehouse district, it proved hard to find for Donald when he was invited for an interview. In this same warehouse are a number of businesses, including a pharmacy where POSAT places Bill with a job. The first room in the POSAT headquarters is a dingy waiting room, which acts as a facade or screening room of sorts so that they do not show their hand to people they are not sure will want to enter the organization. The real waiting room is a gorgeous, ornate room with Renaissance paintings on the walls, part of the personal collection of POSAT's founder. There was a beautiful rug on the floor, some filing cabinets, and some curious fluorescent lights that seemed more advanced that Donald figured possible. Past this room, the Grand Chairman has an office that is also ornate, with a frosted glass door, but between this office and the waiting room there is a balcony. This balcony acts like a bridge between the two rooms over a laboratory. This laboratory is visible from this walkway and is full of extremely advanced technology that Donald is not able to identify by sight, as it is beyond its time. Even the glass-like substance acting as a shielding window between him and the laboratory is too thin to be a substance known by his contemporaries.  "}
{"id": "51336_2", "pid": "51336_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32767, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story centers on three main characters who separately discover the advertisements of the POSAT in different locations. Bill Evans discovers it while reading through a magazine left on a bus seat. Elizabeth Arnable finds the advertisement in the Antivivisectionist Gazette, which she reads in a room with her many cats and a radio. Don Alford receives his invitation to meet with the Grand Chairman of POSAT, which is located nearly one hundred miles away from his home. The POSAT headquarters calls a giant, sprawling warehouse home. The concrete, windowless warehouse covers an entire city block and also houses a printer's plant, upholstering shop, and a pharmacy where Bill Evans finds new employment. Several alleys make way for loading platforms at various locations around the warehouse as well. Don Alford finds the entrance to POSAT at the back of an alley, and he enters through a frosted glass door and walks up a dark, murky stairwell to a dingy reception room. The room Don enters beyond the reception area, however, is ornately decorated with rugs and paintings from the Renaissance periods. Bright tubes light the paintings from above, which astonishes Don because they are neither battery-powered nor wired to anything. His meeting with the Grand Chairman of POSAT takes place outside the room with the paintings on a balcony overlooking the vast warehouse interior. Looking out upon the warehouse floor, Don observes several men appearing to conduct experiments in some kind of laboratory populated with scientific instruments he has never before seen (except for an atomic reactor obscured by a bluish-green plastic). At the bottom of another flight of stairs, Dr. Crandon shows Don the world's largest computer, which was used to analyze his questionnaire results and may be used to predict and motivate human behavior."}
{"id": "51336_2", "pid": "51336_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32767, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "What is POSAT? by Phyllis Sterling Smith takes place in several different settings. However, much of it takes place in the POSAT headquarters itself. A long dark stairway leads to the receptionist\u2019s room. It\u2019s dusty and a little unattractive, but the window that lets in sunlight helps hide that fact. The waiting room is grand and luxurious, filled with ancient, Renaissance paintings and ornate gilding. The paintings were lit up from the bottom by contained radioactive lights. The headquarters has a laboratory in it as well, filled with previously uninvented equipment, such as an atomic reactor. Scientists and worker bees are hard at work, studiously bent over their equipment. In the basement rests a supercomputer equipped with the ability to understand humans based on their answers to multiple-choice questions or the papers they write. "}
{"id": "51336_3", "pid": "51336_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Mr. Crandon an important character in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32788, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Crandon is a member of POSAT, and he is also a professor, published author, and researcher. Don admires Mr. Crandon as an intellectual before he realizes that Crandon is also the Grand Chairman of POSAT. When Don finds out that Crandon is a member of the secret society, he is shocked. Don knows that Crandon is a highly intelligent person, and POSAT seems like a scam. When Crandon explains the truth about the ancient society, its history, its goals, and its ability to pick the finest individuals to join its ranks, Don listens carefully because of his prior connection to Crandon. Had the Grand Chairman been a complete stranger to Don, he might have written the entire experience off as a manipulative scheme or a simply impossible endeavor. After one short conversation and a tour of the building, Don is willing to join POSAT as a member. Crandon is a persuasive salesman and a true believer in the organization and its goal to make a more civil society. "}
{"id": "51336_3", "pid": "51336_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Mr. Crandon an important character in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32788, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dr. Crandon contributes two major things to this story. The first is that he was Donald Alford's mentor as a research scientist, so he was in no small part responsible for Donald's training, giving him the tools he needed to do the research he was doing at work and could be doing with POSAT. The other major role that he plays is that of Grand Chairman of POSAT. Not only is he in charge of the organization as a whole, but he is the one who explains the history and the goals of the organization to the scientists that are recruited. "}
{"id": "51336_3", "pid": "51336_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Mr. Crandon an important character in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32788, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dr. Crandon is a research physicist and former professor of Don Alford. When Don first discovers the POSAT ad, he is reading a research paper by Crandon in The Bulletin of Physical Research. Crandon's instruction grounded Alford in the mastery of and commitment to the scientific process and thereby contributed to his skepticism regarding POSAT's promise of mystical wisdom. Therefore, Don is shocked to discover the Grand Chairman of POSAT is Dr. Crandon himself. Crandon delineates the history of POSAT as a hundreds-of-years-old organization meant to preserve and advance the knowledge and discoveries of its founder. The discoveries run the gamut of technology, mathematics, and physical science and pre-date contemporary discoveries such as atomic reactors by centuries. As Crandon explains, these discoveries have been kept secret because humanity could not be trusted to use them responsibly. In the meantime, POSAT has developed a massive computing machine that can analyze human behavior to determine motivations and predict reactions to certain events and knowledge. Crandon hopes that by joining POSAT, Don can use his knowledge of physics to contribute to their mission and, eventually, peacefully introduce their discoveries to society."}
{"id": "51336_3", "pid": "51336_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Mr. Crandon an important character in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32788, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dr. Crandon was a professor at a university that Donald Alford once attended. As a fellow scientist, he wrote several research papers and was even published in scientific journals. Donald Alford was reading his latest scholarly journal article when he came across the advertisement for POSAT. It\u2019s clear that Alford admires Dr. Crandon both as his former student and as a scientist. It is later revealed that Dr. Crandon is in fact the Grand Master of the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. He is not the founder, however, but he serves his organization with pride. Alford\u2019s curiosity, scientific attitude, and admiration for Dr. Crandon were several factors in his admittance to joining POSAT. "}
{"id": "51336_4", "pid": "51336_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the history of POSAT?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32762, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth, POSAT, is an ancient secret society. It was founded by a genius of a man who lived during the Italian Renaissance, roughly 400 years ago. The founder was a mathematician and scientist, and he invented calculus, created the quantum theory of light, and wrote Maxwell\u2019s equations. However, he did not get credit for any of these ideas. He also designed the atomic reactor that Don sees in the laboratory of the building. The founder understood how dangerous the atomic bomb was, and he did not want to give his peers the tools to create such a powerful weapon. He did not trust men who were at war with one another over political power. Still, he did not want his knowledge to vanish when he died, so he created POSAT. He was willing to share his scientific and mathematical secrets, but he did not wish for untrustworthy people to get their hands on the information until it would be safe to do so. The founder also wanted POSAT to work towards a more peaceful society where everyone could be trusted to share knowledge and information without the fear of it leading to catastrophic events. \n\nIn the centuries since the society was founded, the members have invented new tools and technologies that are not available anywhere else in the world, like the atomic reactor shield and the lightbulbs that hang above each Renaissance painting in the waiting room. Yet, the secret society\u2019s main goal is to create a civilized society, not new inventions. In an effort to make that vision a reality, members of POSAT created a very large computer that seeks to decode human motivation. The computer used Don\u2019s multiple choice questionnaire to determine that Don would be a good fit for the society because he is trustworthy. Although it seems like POSAT should involve more renowned scientists and peacekeepers to make sure it accomplishes its mission, it must also guard all of its secrets, and in an increasingly surveilled state, that would be nearly impossible to do while also including great thought leaders. \n"}
{"id": "51336_4", "pid": "51336_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the history of POSAT?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32762, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "POSAT, or The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth, is a secret society that considers itself \"ancient and honorable\", which has been active since the Renaissance Era. They put ads in magazines to attract new members, stating that anyone can unlock the key to life through their pamphlets. The organization is led by a Grand Chairman, a spot currently filled by Dr. Crandon. When the organization was founded in the Renaissance Era, some four hundred years before the time in which the story takes place, the technology did not exist to act on the founder's theories. For instance, the atomic reactor that powers the headquarters has only been in use for twenty years, but was designed four hundred years ago. This was how the founder operated, well ahead of his time, developing ideas in the physical sciences far past what anyone would have expected, even of a genius. He donated a number of paintings from his personal collection, so much of the contemporary headquarters has his mark on it, even from an aesthetic standpoint. "}
{"id": "51336_4", "pid": "51336_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the history of POSAT?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32762, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "POSAT was founded four hundred years prior to the events of the story by a genius mathematician and physical scientist and a group of fellow \"brilliant men\" capable of advancing his scientific discoveries and committing them to secrecy. The founder lived during the Italian Renaissance and used his own mind to invent and discover, among other things, calculus, the quantum theory of light, the theory of relativity, wave mechanics, and nuclear reactions. The founder realized mankind was not able to wield this knowledge responsibly, so POSAT was designed to withhold this information until the time came in history when they could be trusted with it. POSAT operates its headquarters in a large warehouse, in the center of which is a large lab full of researchers where Dr. Crandon oversees the continuing work of the founder. The warehouse also houses businesses like the pharmacy that employs desperate people like Bill Evans, who turns to POSAT as a last resort, and the print shop that publishes advertisements that reach people like Elizabeth Arnable, whose belief in mysticism borders on religious."}
{"id": "51336_4", "pid": "51336_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the history of POSAT?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32762, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth was founded four centuries ago by a genius. He discovered radioactivity and nuclear bombs hundreds of years before the rest of the world, designed the atomic reactor, invented calculus, and more. Impossible things that have yet to be discovered or invented in the 21st Century. The idea behind POSAT was to keep this man\u2019s inventions a secret from the rest of the world, as well as continue making such amazing technological advances. \nSo, POSAT continued as a secret society, committing members who were dedicated to maintaining secrecy and developing ideas and theories that could be used to save the world, not harm it. They are currently dedicated to discovering more about the human motivation and how it can be used to perpetual world peace. This way all discoveries that are made in the future (however dangerous or wonderful they may be) will not be used to incite war, human disaster, or violence. \n"}
{"id": "51336_5", "pid": "51336_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Bill and Elizabeth contribute to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32783, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bill and Elizabeth are minor characters in the story, but they are key in demonstrating how POSAT\u2019S recruiting efforts work. Bill, Elizabeth, and Don all see the same magazine advertisement and decide to send their coupons in the mail and receive an informational pamphlet in return. Bill is motivated by his desire to change his life. He has lost his job and feels useless and dejected. Elizabeth wants to join the ancient society because she truly believes it can offer her profound wisdom. She also believes that her cats are her family members reincarnated, so she\u2019s clearly a gullible person who hopes to find magic and miracles in her everyday life. Don is curious about the advertisement, and as a naturally skeptical person, he assumes it\u2019s all a hoax.\n\nPOSAT\u2019s correspondence with the three highly different individuals starts out the same, but after gaining a little bit of insight into each person\u2019s background, job, religious beliefs, and motivation for joining the society, the people at POSAT individualize Bill, Elizabeth, and Don\u2019s responses. Bill receives a pamphlet with vague answers to life\u2019s problems, while Elizabeth gets literature about topics like the sacred cats of ancient Egypt. She is also offered an official membership to the group and told to contribute $5 per month. Don, however, is given an in-depth psychological exam. \n\nTowards the end of the story, Mr. Crandon reveals how POSAT\u2019s magazine advertisements work to attract people to the secret society. The new supercomputer they have invented has created the perfect combination of intrigue, symbolism, and promise of knowledge to get the right peoples\u2019 attention. Don, for example, was immediately taken by POSAT\u2019s logo, although he could not explain why. When people like Bill and Elizabeth apply to become members, they are pacified through other means. Elizabeth is an example of a religious fanatic who contributes to the society financially while also feeling deeply satisfied at her inclusion. Bill is an example of someone who is desperate and wants to try to join the society as a way to change his life.  Since POSAT wants a more civilized and peaceful society, they work with those people by finding them new jobs or renovating their homes. \n"}
{"id": "51336_5", "pid": "51336_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Bill and Elizabeth contribute to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32783, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bill Evans is a pharmacist who does not currently have a job, and is hesitant to fill out the long form he was given in return for his request for a POSAT booklet. Elizabeth Arnable, on the other hand, is overjoyed to have the chance to talk about herself and send in the form, providing much more information than was requested of her. Not only do the two different people allow the reader to see that POSAT sends different responses in the mail to different people, but we learn at the end of the story that these different people play different roles in the organization. Neither Bill nor Elizabeth will contribute scientific knowledge but each have their place in the organization. People like Elizabeth, for instance, are kept interested with various pamphlets, and contribute to the organization if they want to--Elizabeth asks how much dues are, so she is given the chance to contribute financially. Bill, on the other hand, is someone who looks to the organization as a last resort, so POSAT takes advantage of the opportunity to study human motivation, practicing their newly developed theories by providing Bill with a pharmacy job and keeping an eye on him. "}
{"id": "51336_5", "pid": "51336_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Bill and Elizabeth contribute to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32783, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bill Evans is an unemployed pharmacist, who turns to POSAT as a last-ditch effort to escape the financial ruin of his current situation. He discovers an advertisement for POSAT in a copy of Your Life and Psychology on an empty bus seat, and writes in to get more information on its promise that its secrets can \"alter the course of your life!\" Likewise, Elizabeth Arnable discovers the advertisement in a copy of Antivivisectionist Gazette, a magazine she reads by chance despite the fact that she rarely reads and prefers listening to the radio with her cats. Most likely due to the fact that she believes her cats are reincarnated family members, the vague mysticism of the advertisement attracts her, and she immediately wants to become a POSAT member. Although this same messaging disappoints Bill, he is pleased that around the same time that he receives his information packet from POSAT, he receives a job offer at a pharmacy that shares the same building as their headquarters. Elizabeth receives pamphlets of information about the sacred cats of ancient Egypt, a POSAT membership pin, and details about membership fees. Later, Dr. Crandon explains these fees are collected from people who view their POSAT membership with religious fervor to cover operational expenses. The pharmacy where Bill Evans works was built in an effort to employ those who turn to POSAT out of desperation, and there they become the subjects of covert rehabilitation to help them reenter society using POSAT's knowledge and discoveries."}
{"id": "51336_5", "pid": "51336_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWhat is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\n \n \n \n The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:\n \n \n MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\n \n \n What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\n \n \n Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!\n \n \n Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\n \n \n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\n \n \n POSAT\n \n \n an ancient secret society\n \n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet\u2014sometime\u2014when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.\n \n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n\"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n \n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n \n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.\n \n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n \n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n \n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.\n \n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.\n \n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself\u2014if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.\n \n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n \n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information\u2014about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.\n \n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give\u2014all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.\n \n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.\n \n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n \n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n \n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n \n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!\"\n \n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n \n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n \n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n \n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.\n \n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.\n \n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.\n \n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n \n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.\n \n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.\n \n \n\n \n \"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n \n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort.\"\n \n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n \n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n \n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n \n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be\u2014a secret society\u2014and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n \n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n \n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.\n \n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n \n Dear Doctor Alford:\n \n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.\n \n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n \n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.\n  Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!\n \n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!\n \n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or\u2014or\u2014\"\n \n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.\n \n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?\"\n \n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.\n \n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.\n \n \n\n \n At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n \n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n \n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.\n \n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.\n \n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n \n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room\u2014\"\n \n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n \n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug\u2014Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters\u2014of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.\n \n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.\n \n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level\u2014that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n \n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.\n  Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.\n \n In fact\u2014it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.\n \n There were no wires!\n \n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n \n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n \n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!\n  But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!\n \n \n And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n \n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now\u2014\n \n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n \n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.\n \n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n \n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.\n \n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n \n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\n \n \n\n \n But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n \n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n \n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n \n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?\n \n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n \n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you again.\"\n \n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \" You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?\"\n \n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place\u2014didn't anything make sense any longer?\n \n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and\u2014yes\u2014afraid.\"\n \n \n\n \n Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n \n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over.\"\n \n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n \n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n \n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n \n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n \n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n \n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n \n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection\u2014which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory.\"\n \n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian\u2014\"\n \n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them.\"\n \n \"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?\"\n \n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim\u2014an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries.\"\n \n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n \n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however.\"\n \n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.\n \n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n \n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations\u2014although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries\u2014developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei\u2014\"\n \n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet\u2014there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.\n \n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.\n \n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible.\"\n \n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n \n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n \n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n \n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\n \n \n\n \n Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.\n \n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.\n \n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!\"\n \n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n\"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n \n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n \n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.\n \n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats\u2014and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n \n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n \n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n \n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences\u2014that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n \n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project\u2014before it's too late?\"\n \n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n \n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator.\"\n \n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.\n \n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort\u2014lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them\u2014anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.\n \n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n \n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.\n \n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n \n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n \n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n \n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Bill and Elizabeth contribute to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32721, "query_start_index": 32723, "query_end_index": 32783, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bill and Elizabeth are two other people who responded to the POSAT ad in a magazine. They are examples of the two other things that may happen to people who apply to POSAT, but are not the correct person to get in. \nBill was down on his luck and searching for cosmic change. He needed a job, a better life, and he needed it fast. He responded to the advertisement as his last hope and was disappointed to only receive a metaphysical text in return. However, he was also offered a job at a wholesale pharmacy right next to the POSAT headquarters. Dr. Crandon later reveals that they give back to the world by finding housing, jobs, and more for people down on their luck who apply to POSAT in the hopes of a change. \nElizabeth, on the other hand, is a completely different applicant. She was interested and enthralled by the idea of a secret society, but wouldn\u2019t actually be qualified to join or dedicated to the task at hand. So, POSAT enrolled her, but only sends pamphlets that she would be interested in. For example, they sent her a pamphlet about Egyptian cats, since she had mentioned her cats in her original letter to POSAT. Since she asked about dues, they asked her to contribute $5 monthly which she will do happily. \n"}
{"id": "51210_1", "pid": "51210_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29026, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narrator is awoken by a female voice in his head. He recounts his time as a conformist citizen of Northem, a futuristic dystopian civilization: one day, he wakes up and regards himself in the mirror, observing signs of aging on his face. He sees the toll of the past two years, since the renumbering. \nThe narrator explains that, as part of ensuring the efficiency of Northem, the designation of each citizen is periodically changed. In the most recent one, everyone was assigned six numerical digits and a prefix or suffix of four letters, which often spelled something pronounceable \u2013 for the narrator, the four letters spelled an unspeakably vulgar word. As a result, the narrator is forced to infract from his job and assume non-productive status and begins encountering difficulties in quotidien tasks, such as receiving his realfood package. Furthermore, his designation prevents him from acquiring gainful employment and reassuming productive status, as well as the ability to mate. \nThe narrator then recounts hearing the woman\u2019s voice for the first time. She encourages him to change his name, a difficult thing to do because of its implied criticism of the state. The voice returns in his sleep, nearly every night. Driven by his loneliness and social ostracization, the narrator brings himself to the Govpub Office, a sort of government center, in an attempt to change his designation. \nIn the underground office of his local Govpub Office, the narrator navigates his way to the Numbering and Identity section with help of a cyb, an automated assistant. In the round room that is the Number and Identity department, he observes a remarkably attractive woman at the information desk. Though he is nervous at first, fearing that he will have to share with her his embarrassing name, he dismisses his hesitance and approaches her. He reluctantly shares his name, and asks that she direct him to information concerning state serial designations. \nAs the girl, whose name she reveals is LARA, leads the narrator to information bank 29 where the requested information is stored, they share an inappropriate moment: Lara trips and the narrator grabs her arms. Lara\u2019s demeanor changes, and she now conducts herself in an all-business fashion. At bank 29, Lara explains to the narrator the tasks he must complete in order to change his name, including traveling to the capital. On their way back to the main room, the narrator makes a joke which elicits a laugh from Lara. As she enters the rotunda, she abruptly stops laughing. The narrator, following closely behind, quickly realizes why: two Deacons, officers of the state, are at the central desk. \nOn the night before his departure to the capital, the narrator once again hears the mysterious female voice in his head. She tells him that he is attracted to Lara. On the transport to the capital the narrator sees a young couple holding hands, and pictures himself with Lara in their position.\n"}
{"id": "51210_1", "pid": "51210_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29026, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with the main character having a dream that tells him to do something. Later we learn that the voice in his dream is telling him to escape from the life that he is living now. We learn that there had been an atomic disaster that changed the way people live. The main character explains that now everyone has a code as their name. It consists of six digits with a four letter prefix or suffix. And two years ago when he got his name, it was so unusual and embarrassing that no one even wanted to pronounce it. And the name is the reason he lost his job; it is the reason that he cannot get a woman who would agree to mate with him. He was okay at first with this N/P (Non-Producer) status, however, later he realizes that the boredom of being a N/P is too much. He goes looking for jobs. However, it disappointed him again. When the employer hears about his specialty, they look very delight. However, when he hands them his tag with his name on it, they always tell him that they will call if anything turns up. But just like what happened with the Eugenic Center, no one called. The main character further complains about being an N/P, it might sound great at first, but he cannot even get a package.\n\nFinally, with the voice in his dream telling him to \u201cdo it\u201d every night, he decided to go to the Govpub Office in Center Four to look for ways that he can change his name. At the N. & I. he gets attracted to the information desk girl, L-A-R-A 339/827. He asked her for information regarding how State Serial, thus the names, are assigned, and how they can be changed. After hearing his name, she is a bit shocked, but then she decides to help him out. Then later she points out that he needs to get a travel permit in order to get to Opsych, The Office of Psychological Adjustment. Apparently, Opsych is the only place that can authorize a change to the State Serial. She tells him to explain how his State Serial has affected his E.A.C, and then there may be a chance that they will change it. Even though he is still doubtful that night, the next day he goes to the jetcopter stage and board the ship for Center One. "}
{"id": "51210_1", "pid": "51210_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29026, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narrator awakes after hearing a feminine voice call out to him in his dreams; it is a voice he is used to hearing, but is nevertheless bothersome. As he wakes up, the chief calls him into work, where he practices magnetic mechanics in hopes of developing space travel beyond Mars. The chief tells the narrator that he would like to switch him to another department; the narrator responds by resigning from him job. The world of Mars, divided into the Northem and Southem, has practices in regulating its civilians. One of these was a renaming of everyone in the Northem, where everyone was given four letters and a series of numbers. The narrator's name is unfortunate and unspeakable, and creates difficulty in his profession, causing him to lose his job. The narrator then becomes unemployed, given the Non-Productive status, and struggles to find another job due to his name. The narrator's name also disrupts other aspects of daily life, including mating and social interaction. The narrator considers changing his name, but decides that it would be seen as criticism to the State. However, one night, the voice calls out to him again in his dreams, urging him to change his name. The next day, the narrator is led to the Govpub office by the voice. There, he is led to the Numbering and Identity section, where he meets Lara, sitting at the information desk. The narrator is immediately attracted to Lara, who tells him that names can be changed if he moves to a higher Emotional Adjustment Category. The narrator, already having achieved the highest EAC, argues that if anything, the difficulties his name has given him have lowered it. Lara advises that he pose this argument to the Office of Psychological Adjustment, where he gets a travel permit the next day. That night, the voice in his dreams encourages him yet again to go on this journey, and the following morning he boards the ship, where he notices two prisoners aboard, holding hands despite their lack of freedom. The narrator then considers what it would be like to be there with Lara, nonconforming but happy."}
{"id": "51210_1", "pid": "51210_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29026, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The plot begins with a narrator discussing his morning routine as a citizen of Northem. Northem is located on Earth after the atomic period. He discusses the process of renumbering. The narrator mentions how his designation has been unfortunate since he was assigned it as it is embarrassing and causes people not to want to associate with him. The narrator has an important job but is eventually let go because of his name. As a result of losing his job, he is placed on a Non-Productive status, limiting his ability to require goods and where he can live. An N/P status is not looked upon as good by other citizens of Northem. \n\nThe narrator describes how because of his name and he cannot get a job, mate, or have a social life. Because of the rules of the State, it is unthinkable to change a person\u2019s assigned name. The narrator desperately wants to mate and thinks of ideas on how he might be able to mate. When he sleeps, a seductive voice comes to the narrator in his dreams. The voice encourages the narrator to change his name, even though the idea would be nonconformist according to Northem standards. On the 17th day of the 9th month, the narrator decides to try to change his name and heads to a Govpub office. He is then directed to the Numbering and Identity office where he meets a woman that he finds very attractive. He tells her his name and she reacts negatively, but then recovers. They talk casually, not a common occurrence in Northem. The narrator manages to make Lara, the girl in the office, blush. \n\nLara discusses how she can help the narrator change his name and tells him that he has to go to the Capital and go to the Office of Psychological Adjustment. He needs a travel permit to go to the capital. Over the next day, he is excited about the possibility of his name actually being changed. The voice in his dream continues to encourage him to get his name changed. While on the transportation to the capital, he sees two prisoners who appear to be a couple. They display emotions that he describes as vulgar. Yet, he is curious about their relationship as they sit holding hands. He expresses a desire to be in the same position as the couple, but with him and Lara instead. \n"}
{"id": "51210_2", "pid": "51210_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat appears to be the role of the State in the Northem?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29052, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Northem, one of the two superstates of the world and home to the Narrator, is ruled by the State. It is highly efficient, and allocates alphanumeric designations to its citizens to be used as names. In the most recent renumbering, the State assigns the narrator an unspeakable four-letter designation. \n\tThe State, through its officers the Deacons, enforces norms of acceptability. These norms include the ranges of physical attractiveness within which women are required to stay, the flat tone of voice in which citizens must speak, and the facial expressions citizens are allowed to display. Additionally, the State regulates sexual behaviour: mating is only allowed in Eugenic Centers, and those who infract upon sexual norms are sent to a prison planet called Marscol. \n\tThe State further regulates the allocation of realfood, such as eggs, which is a valuable commodity. When the balance of trade between Northem and Southem, the other superstate, fluctuates, more or less realfood becomes available. Non-productive members of society, so long as they are conformists, or loyal members of the state, are cared for by the State.\n"}
{"id": "51210_2", "pid": "51210_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat appears to be the role of the State in the Northem?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29052, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The State is currently ruling over Northem. They\u2019ve set rules that must be followed by the citizens, those that infract and do not obey will be send to Marscol. Those that follow the rules, the states will provide food to them. Thus, the State cultivate and organize conformists, and tell them to obey rules. Moreover, because the old designations were not efficient, and there are more than two billion people in Northem. Thus the State has decided to introduce a new renumbering system that would be benificial to both the Northm and the Southem. Thus everyone was renumbered. They each receives a six digits along with four digits of prefix or sufix. \n\nFurthermore, the State favors short and succinct languages. It prefers efficiency. They changed the numbering system because it was not efficient; the boss was trying to ease the main character out because he desired an efficient organization; the cyb asked for efficient words when the main character was the Govpub Office. \n\nAlso, there had been political differences between the Northern and Southern states. During those times, they each spread longitudinally across the globe. While not in war currently, both of the states are geared up for it. "}
{"id": "51210_2", "pid": "51210_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat appears to be the role of the State in the Northem?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29052, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Northem acts as the moral, civilized, and orderly opposition to the Southem. The State helps to enforce this order and civility, primarily by the renumbering of its citizens. This structured system of naming attempts to place citizens on similar levels and address each other formally. To challenge this naming system would be to question the authority of the State. Society is also divided into Producers and Non-Producers; the Non-Producers are seen as draining of the Northem, reinforcing productivity as a defining value of the State. The State also aids in enforcing mating regulations; the narrator notes that pre-atomic civilization had free mating, where public affection and partnership was common; however, mating is now a State-regulated activity as provided by Eugenic Centers."}
{"id": "51210_2", "pid": "51210_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat appears to be the role of the State in the Northem?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29052, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The citizens of Northem are conformists that dare do not go against the State nor criticize the State. The State regulates nearly every aspect of a person\u2019s life. The State of Northem is in charge of renumbering, assigning a work designation, food allotments, sleeping arrangements, and mating abilities for its citizens. Renumbering is claimed to help the war-type struggle against Southem. With the new designation, every person was assigned six digits and four letters as a prefix or suffix. "}
{"id": "51210_3", "pid": "51210_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the narrator\u2019s relationship to the mysterious voice in his dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29070, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "As the narrator finds it increasingly difficult to find a sexual partner as a result of his state-appointed designation, he begins to hear a mysterious female voice in his dreams. She first encourages him to change his name. Initially, he worries that his sleep-learner, a wearable head device which enables learning during sleep, has malfunctioned, but he finds no evidence of this. \nThe narrator hears the voice nearly every night. He often worries about the voice, as the contents of its speech are heretical. She encourages him to go to the Govpub office, a sort of government office in his locality, and he eventually obliges. \nOn the night before the narrator is slated to take a transport to the capital to change his name, he hears the voice again. It encourages him to persevere, and that he is attracted to Lara, a woman he had met earlier in the week. The voice further pushes him to pursue a relationship with Lara once he is able to change his name.\n"}
{"id": "51210_3", "pid": "51210_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the narrator\u2019s relationship to the mysterious voice in his dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29070, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mysterious voice always come to the main character during his dreams. It insists that he should \u201cdo it,\u201d thus change his way of living. Because of his name, he has lost his job, and he is not able to mate. Even living an everyday life is quite difficult. The voice wants him to change that. She does not state that she want him to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. The narrator\u2019s difficulty in finding a new job and in having a normal social life negatively affects him because of name and no post. He feels lonely, thus there is a desire to change his name. The urge to reproduce himself becomes unbearable. He concoctes all sorts of wild schemes. The mysterious voice encourages him to dare to change his name, and find the freedom. When he even catches himeself wondering just how he'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be. The voice will appear at night and tell him the prompts. He absorbs the concepts unconsciously. He follows what the voice leads him to do. On the night before he board the ship for Center One, he thinks of objections to refute the voice. He thinks of his life now, and how breaking away from it will be very difficult. However, even though he is still hesitating if he should go, the voice seems to understand him very well. It reminds him of Lara, of how there will be a way to change his name, and to take her with him. "}
{"id": "51210_3", "pid": "51210_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the narrator\u2019s relationship to the mysterious voice in his dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29070, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narrator experiences a voice in his dreams that encourages him to take risks, particularly regarding changing his name. He hears the voice practically every night, and describes it as a woman's voice: intense, seductive, and intriguing. The voice, though enticing, troubles the narrator, as he is concerned about the consequences of the actions that she is suggesting. However, as he continues to hear the voice every night, he starts to consider obeying it. The voice then drives him to begin the journey of changing his name, which is risky and radical in his society, and also tempts him in pursuing Lara and gaining freedom."}
{"id": "51210_3", "pid": "51210_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the narrator\u2019s relationship to the mysterious voice in his dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29070, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mysterious voice in the narrator\u2019s dreams talks in a seductive tone that was low and intense. The voice in his dreams went against the narrator\u2019s conformists ideals that fit the State in the Northem. It suggests non-standard actions in an emotional tone that is unthinkable behavior in the Northem. The actions the voice suggest are ones of nonconformity and criticisms against the State. The narrator is hesitant and unsure about the voice\u2019s presence. The voice continues to encourage the narrator to change his name. It even suggests that he should act on his attraction to Lara. "}
{"id": "51210_4", "pid": "51210_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does the narrator\u2019s name affect his social life?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narrator, who was designated an unspeakably vulgar four-letter designation during the last renumbering, has been negatively affected by his new name. Because of its distracting effect on those who learn it, he is forced to resign from his job studying magnetic mechanics and assume non-productive status, which in turn hampers his ability to acquire realfood. Theoretical research which the narrator privately conducts could not be published. His designation further prevents him from participating in group games at the rec center, special interest clubs, and State Loyalty chapters. The narrator is unable to mate since, at the Eugenic Centers where mating is regulated by the State, he must submit an application which must be approved by women who are authorized to mate with him."}
{"id": "51210_4", "pid": "51210_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does the narrator\u2019s name affect his social life?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "His social life is heavily affected by his name. He cannot get himself off the N/P status with his name. Firslty, he loses his job due to this name. He can still remember the day that he got his name, and the embarrasement that came with it. His boss finds his name making the company less efficient, making him resign. Secondly, he cannot find any new job. Each of the employer, hearing his name, would tell him that they will call of something comes up. But they never do. Secondly, he can hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. No special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters would allow him to join them; simply because of his name, he can scarcely submit any findings for publication, at least not under his name. Moreover, because he is at N/P status, he cannot even get his order because the distributer tells him to get to the end of the line. And the food packages never reachese the end. Lastly, he cannot mate, no one at the Eugenic Center would even bother to call him back after hearing his name. No woman would want to mate with him. Thus, he feels terribly lonely. "}
{"id": "51210_4", "pid": "51210_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does the narrator\u2019s name affect his social life?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narrator's name makes it difficult for him to lead a normal life, and instead makes him very lonely. At the beginning of the story, the narrator's chief lets him go from his place of employment, because of the difficulties that his name brought to the workplace. He has trouble getting a new job, despite his impressive expertise, because of his name. This makes the narrator stuck in the Non-Productive status, which interrupts his everyday life, including on realfood day, joining games and clubs, and even being unable to publish anything with his name on it. These difficulties also apply for mating; the narrator is unable to find a partner and finds himself extremely lonely. "}
{"id": "51210_4", "pid": "51210_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does the narrator\u2019s name affect his social life?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narrator is embarrassed by his name and upset with it due to its effect on his social life. Women and others, in general, become quite embarrassed when they hear his name. People seem to not want to associate with him due to his name. He loses his job because of his name, though the manager does not directly state that it is the reason. People do not want him to join their group games, clubs, or State Loyalty chapters and his research is unable to be submitted for publication. Because people have adverse reactions to his name, the narrator is lonely due to the lack of his social life. In addition, because of his name, the narrator is not able to mate with a woman. His inability to find a woman that will mate with him creates a longing and a desire for him to mate with a woman. "}
{"id": "51210_5", "pid": "51210_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do others react upon hearing the narrator\u2019s name?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Typically, people are unwelcoming of the narrator upon learning his name. During his job search, he is welcome in virtue of his previous experience in space drives, but is quickly dismissed upon sharing his name. In submitting his application to mate at a Eugenic Center, the clerk dismisses the narrator\u2019s chances of finding a mate with a reminder that the women are able to refuse. Lara, the information clerk at the department of Numbering and Identity, is taken aback and hesitates in recording the narrator\u2019s personal information. \n"}
{"id": "51210_5", "pid": "51210_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do others react upon hearing the narrator\u2019s name?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "People around the narrator are embarrassed to even utter his name. When he reports his name to his chief of his past job, his boss was speechless, and definitely was feeling awkward. He did not give the name to the secretarial engineer, who usually takes care of the names. Instead, he went directly to the administrative circuits. Later, the boss asked him to resign, simply because of his name. Moreover, when trying to get hired for other jobs, upon hearing his name, the employer would react with confusion, and they would try to be polite and say that they will call if any thing turn up. The women at the Eugenic Center have similar reactions. They would be embarrassed, and then tell him that they will call if anything comes up. But they never do. At monthly realfood day, he can hardly get the package because the distributor sees his post and realizes that he is a Non-Producer, they would tell him to go to the end of the line, where the food never gets there. Even Lara was a bit shocked, and she has to take some time to recover. "}
{"id": "51210_5", "pid": "51210_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do others react upon hearing the narrator\u2019s name?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Upon hearing the narrator's name, people are shocked, and sympathetically try to ignore it. Firstly, when the narrator first reports his name to the chief, he reacts silently and refuses to share it with anyone else. The chief then does not refer to the narrator by his name, instead calling him by nicknames. When the clerk at the Eugenic Center hears the narrator's name, he coughs awkwardly and reminds the narrator that women have the right to refuse entering the mating booth with him. When Lara hears the narrator's name, she tries to hide her reaction and looks down, but takes longer to record it."}
{"id": "51210_5", "pid": "51210_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nI, the Unspeakable\n \n \n By WALT SHELDON\n \n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n \"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!\n \n \n \n I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.\n \n \" Do it! \" she said. \" Please do it! For me! \"\n \n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n \n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n \n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.\n \n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles\u2014or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n \n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.\n \n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n \n I'd go out again today.\n \n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n \n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n \n Everything came back in a rush\u2014\n \n My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.\n  Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?\n \n \n \n\n \n You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n \n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.\n \n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.\n \n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n \n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n \n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n \n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.\n \n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n \n A four letter word.\n \n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n \n Mine was.\n \n It was unspeakable.\n \n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n \n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.\n \n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important\u2014magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars\u2014and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.\n \n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.\n \n \n\n \n The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n \n \"Er\u2014old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n \n \"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?\"\n \n \"Well, I\u2014er\u2014know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.\"\n \n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract\u2014deliberately infract\u2014it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n \n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract.\"\n \n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh\u2014fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you would.\"\n \n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n \n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n \n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department\u2014any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\n \n \n\n \n A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n \n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.\n \n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package\u2014and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n \n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later.\"\n \n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.\n \n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.\n \n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n \n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.\n \n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice\u2014to her \u2014in a moment.\n \n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication\u2014not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n \n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\n \n \n\n \n Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n \n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n \n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n \n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n \n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.\n \n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.\n \n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n \n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n \n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n \n \" Try it ,\" she said. \" Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please\u2014for me. \"\n \n \n\n \n She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n \n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n \n It hammered away.\n \n \" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! \"\n \n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n \n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \" Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. \"\n \n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy\u2014desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n \n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.\n \n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n \n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.\n \n The cyb's mechanical voice\u2014they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds right\u2014said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology.\"\n \n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n\"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature.\"\n \n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.\n \n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n \n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for\u2014\"\n \n I switched it off.\n \n \n\n \n Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.\n \n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.\n \n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n \n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde\u2014but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n \n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n \n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.\n \n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n \n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard\u2014or was it?\n \n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n \n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed.\"\n \n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n \n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n \n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014no post at present. N/P status.\"\n \n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n \n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n \n Then I paused again.\n \n She said, \"And your name?\"\n \n I took a deep breath and told her.\n \n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare\u2014\n \n \n\n \n She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n \n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n \n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n \n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.\n \n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.\n \n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n \n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get\u2014well, pretty lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n \n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n \n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n \n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The\u2014er\u2014social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n \n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n \n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n \n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\n \n \n\n \n She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.\n \n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.\n \n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n \n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n \n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n \n After that she was very business-like.\n \n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.\n \n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n\"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be\u2014a little difficult.\"\n \n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it would be easy.\"\n \n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n \n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n \n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n \n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n \n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number.\"\n \n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n \n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n \n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol\u2014or\u2014in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n \n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down.\"\n \n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n \n \"How do you mean?\"\n \n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change.\"\n \n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n \n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment.\"\n \n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.\n \n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.\n \n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?\"\n \n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.\"\n \n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'\"\n \n \n\n \n She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n \n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n \n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n \n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.\n \n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.\n \n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again\u2014but of course I didn't dare.\n \n \n\n III\n \n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n \n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.\n \n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.\n \n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n \n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....\n \n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:\n \n Wherever I go,\n \n I\n \n go too,\n And spoil everything.\n \n That was it. The story of mankind.\n \n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n \n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice\u2014the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.\n \n \" You have taken the first step ,\" she said. \" You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... \"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n \n \" The woman, Lara, attracts you ,\" said the voice.\n \n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.\n \n \" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. \"\n \n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n \n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n \n It was morning.\n \n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.\n \n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.\n \n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.\n \n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n \n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.\n \n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do others react upon hearing the narrator\u2019s name?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28984, "query_start_index": 28986, "query_end_index": 29049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "People have various reactions when they hear the narrator\u2019s name. When he first reports his name to his chief, the chief does not respond directly and instead becomes red in the face and chokes from the shock. Individuals at the different bureaus during his search for a job are excited when they learn of his job specialty, but lose their delight when they see his name on his name tag. A clerk at the Eugenic Center reacts to the narrator\u2019s name with surprise and becomes uncomfortable, shown by his fidgeting and coughing that follows hearing the name. In general, many people have an uncomfortable reaction to his name and have to take a second to process it and recover from their reaction. "}
{"id": "63048_1", "pid": "63048_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30222, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gregory Malcolm is a secretary to J. Foster Andrews, the wealthy leader of the Galactic Metals Corporation. In the control room of Andrews\u2019s space yacht the Carefree, Sparks, the radioman, fails to downplay the seriousness of their situation to Malcolm: the Carefree has been sucked into an unpredictable vortex and the fate of the ship and its occupants is uncertain. \n\tMalcolm approaches the dining room, where Andrews and members of his family are enjoying breakfast. He is unnoticed by his employers, but takes note of Andrews\u2019s beautiful daughter Crystal and her betrothed Ralph Breadon. Suddenly, Andrews calls Malcolm over to complain about the honey and to enquire about the state of the Galactic market. Malcolm, in virtue of the fact that the vortex has blocked communication to and from the Carefree, is unable to answer. Crystal asks Malcolm if they are in danger, but before he is able to answer the question, Crystal\u2019s older brother Bert enters drunkenly and suggests that they are doomed. \nSparks abruptly enters the room and confirms Bert\u2019s drunken suspicion: they have been caught in a gravitation downdraft and must evacuate to a life skiff. On the skiff with members of the Andrews family, Sparks, a cabin-boy, and Breadon, Malcolm navigates above a celestial body and observes the crash of the Carefree. Just as Malcolm surrenders control of the skiff to Breadon, its engines engage and they quickly fall towards the planet. Breadon deftly manipulates the controls, and they land safely. As Malcolm quickly congratulates Breadon on his landing, the latter blames and berates the secretary for the fall. The cabin-boy, however, points out that Breadon\u2019s sleeve was responsible for their descent. \nMalcolm and Sparks examine the damage to the skiff, and Sparks shares his frustrations about Malcolm\u2019s submissive, secretarial behaviour. Malcolm concludes that they are on a rarely-visited, unpopulated, vast, and dangerous moon of Saturn called Titan. Malcolm resolves not to tell the Andrews, fearing that the information would only make them panic. Meanwhile, the Andrews family are in disarray over how best to remove necessities from the skiff.\nBreadon delegates to Sparks the role of establishing communication. Sparks, however, responds poorly and reveals that they are on Titan, and that their chances of rescue are dim. \n"}
{"id": "63048_1", "pid": "63048_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30222, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gregory Malcolm is the secretary of J. Foster Andrews, a wealthy man in charge of the Galactic Metals Corporation. While aboard their ship, Hannigan, a radio operator and companion of Malcolm, discloses that they have entered a vortex and remain trapped with no transmission or radio signal. Hannigan advises that Malcolm doesn't tell the Andrews family and instead waits until there is more information. Malcolm enters the dining dome, where the Andrews family sits, including Crystal, their daughter who Malcolm admires, and Ralph Breadon, her suitor. J. Foster asks Malcolm for information about the corporation's business, to which Malcolm is unable to answer due to the lack of radio transmission. The Andrews family notices the odd situation outside the ship's port and questions Malcolm further, but a drunk Bert Andrews interrupts, panicking and revealing the dire situation at hand. Malcolm reassures the family that there is no immediate danger yet, but Hannigan then enters, urgently yelling at everyone to board the life skiff due to emergency. The team runs to the life skiff, where Malcolm and Hannigan frantically operate it until Breadon insists on taking over. Breadon gains control but the life skiff still faces danger, and as Malcolm and Hannigan scramble over the controls, Breadon steers the life skiff onto the ground; the team survives but the skiff is wrecked. Breadon blames Malcolm for the crash, and Malcolm leaves the situation alone, which Hannigan discourages. After inspection, Malcolm determines that the team has crashed on the planet Titan."}
{"id": "63048_1", "pid": "63048_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30222, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with Hannigan trying to tell Greg that the atmospherics don\u2019t need to be worried, these are not worth reporting to the boss. However, Greg has studied astrogation and is sure that they are in a vortex. He knows that they have been in the vortex for more than eight hours, but he has no idea how much longer nor how far the ship will go. Agreeing not to tell the boss, Greg goes upstairs to the dining room. Right after he arrives by the door, J. Foster Andrews of Galactic Metals Corporation, starts calling him. He comes in and is asked about the transmission, which he says that there is none. Before he has time to finish explaining himself, Bert Andrews, one of J. Foster Andrews\u2019 son, came in and told everyone that they have been in the vortex for a long time, and they could crash at any moment. J. Foster then turns to confirm with Greg, who explains that it is indeed true, only a bit exaggerated. However, Hannigan comes in and rushes everyone to get on Number Four life-skiff. They are about to crash. \n\nThey all rush to the life-skiff. And Breadon, the person that J. Foster Andrew daughter\u2019s engaged to, tries to get the control from Greg. And in the middle of this, someone hit the control-keys and the motor is killed. Then all of a sudden, Greg, Breadon, and Hannigan all try to reach the control. However, in the end, it is the Breadon that performed the miracle in saving all of them. Later Greg and Hannigan goes to check the ship while others are all doing their own things. Looking around, Greg realizes that they are on Titan, one of Saturn\u2019s satellites. Then Breadon orders Hannigan to send an SOS message to the nearest space cruiser. Hannigan asks Breadon, mockingly, what he should use, and if he knows where they are at. Breadon got stuck with so many questions coming at once, then it is Greg who said: they are on the northern hemisphere of the satellite. "}
{"id": "63048_1", "pid": "63048_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30222, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Sparks and Malcolm discussing their predicament on the ship Carefree. The ship is trapped in a vortex that has blown it off course. Malcolm goes to the rotunda where food is being served to the Andrews family. The Andrews family is surrounding the table, including Crystal, who Malcolm fancies. After some loud talking from the family, eventually, Greg informs them that they are in an ionized field and the transmission does not work. The family becomes quite concerned at the news. The son of Andrews, Bert, walks into the doorway in a drunken manner. He tells everyone that they should be concerned. While Malcolm is trying to calm the family down, Sparks runs into the room yelling at everyone to head towards the life skiff. There is a mad rush towards the life skiff that caused a lot of confusion. The Carefree bursts into flames and Malcolm says that he is unsure if the other skiffs were able to escape in time. \n\nMalcolm is piloting the ship when Breadon commands him to hand over the controls. When he does, Breadon\u2019s sleeve brushes against the control keys causing the motors to be turned off. Many people rush to fix the skiff, but Breadon is ultimately the person who guides the skiff to the ground. Breadon yells at Malcolm for interfering, but the cabin boy, Tommy, defends Malcolm. Breadon continues to belittle Malcolm. Sparks tells Malcolm that he is strange and he needs to defend himself against Breadon. \n\nEveryone disembarks from the ship. Bert tries to give orders, but the orders seem to be nonsensical. Malcolm is the first person to realize where the group has crash-landed. Breadon then commands Sparks to send an SOS message. Sparks mocks him by questioning how he should send a message and where he should say they are located, knowing that Breadon does not have the answer. Breadon is not able to specify exactly where they are located. Malcolm completes an experiment that is able to narrow down which hemisphere of the satellite they are located in, displaying a skill that Breadon does not possess. Maud Andrews is inquisitive of how Malcolm could have possibly been able to know where they crash-landed. \n"}
{"id": "63048_2", "pid": "63048_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "On life skiff number four, the skiff onto which Gregory Malcolm had evacuated were himself, his employers J. Foster Andrews, the head of the Galactic Metals Corporations, and his family: Andrews\u2019s tall and well-styled wife Enid, his plain-featured, out of shape but beautiful-eyed sister Maud, Maud\u2019s poodle Cuddles, Andrews\u2019s drunk son Bert, Andrews\u2019s beautiful daughter Crystal, and the man to whom Crystal was promised, Ralph Breadon. Malcolm describes Ralph as tall and strong-knit, with tanned skin. Also aboard the skiff were the maid of the Andrews family, \u2018Tina Laney, a cabin boy named Tommy O\u2019Doul, and the radio engineer of the Carefree named Hannigan, who is also called Sparks. \n"}
{"id": "63048_2", "pid": "63048_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Accompanying Malcolm on the life skiff are Hannigan, also known as Sparks, who is a radio operator, Tommy, a young cabin-boy, Tina, the maid, and the Andrews family and their company. The Andrews family consists of J. Foster Andrews, Malcolm's employer, his wife Enid, his sister Maud, his daughter Crystal, his son Bert, and Crystal's suitor, Ralph Breadon. The Andrews make up the majority of the members on the life skiff, while Malcom, Hannigan, Tommy, and Tina work under them and attempt to evade disaster. "}
{"id": "63048_2", "pid": "63048_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The members that boarded the life skiff with Malcolm are J. Foster Andrews, his wife, their daughter, the maid, Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O\u2019Doul, and a cabin boy, whom Malcolm has no idea where he came from and when. J. Foster Andrews is the employer of people that are working for the Galatic Metals Corporation. His wife is Enid. Their daughter is Crystal, who is engaged to Breadon. Maud, the sister of Andrews is also on board. She and per puppy \"Cuddles\" board the life-skiff together. They were not able to see any other life-skiffs. They are unsure if they did break free of they got caught along with the ship. "}
{"id": "63048_2", "pid": "63048_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Those that were able to make it into the life skiff with Malcolm during the emergency include Andrew, Enid, Crystal, Ralph, Maud, Sparks, Tommy O\u2019Doul, and Bert. Bert is Andrew\u2019s son. Enid is the wife of Andrew. Maud is Andrew\u2019s sister. Crystal is Andrew\u2019s daughter. Ralph is the man Crystal is pledged to. Tommy is a cabin boy. Malcolm is Andrew\u2019s secretary. Sparks Hannigan is a radio operator. Tommy, Malcolm, and Sparks are all employees of Andrews\u2019 family. "}
{"id": "63048_3", "pid": "63048_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Malcolm and Breadon?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30245, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gregory Malcolm is a secretary to J. Foster Andrews, father of Crystal Andrews, who is promised to Ralph Breadon. Malcolm is attracted to Crystal, and dislikes Breadon\u2019s appearance, though he admires it as well. In the life skiff, Breadon behaves in a domineering manner towards Malcolm, suggesting that he hand over the controls of the skiff. During the transfer of controls, however, Breadon\u2019s sleeve is caught on a switch and causes the skiff to crash towards Titan. During their descent, Malcolm attempts to control their trajectory but is dismissed by Breadon, who successfully lands the skiff on the moon of Saturn. Malcolm quickly congratulates Breadon, but is berated for interfering. Despite this, however, Malcolm later rationalizes Breadon\u2019s arrogant behaviour and maintains to Sparks, the radio engineer, that he holds no grudge against him, seemingly hiding his anger behind his job as a secretary. \n\n"}
{"id": "63048_3", "pid": "63048_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Malcolm and Breadon?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30245, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Malcolm and Breadon have a tense relationship. Malcolm is enamored of Crystal, and admires her beauty and loveliness. However, Ralph Breadon is Crystal's lover, which sets a competitive tone between the two. Malcolm is jealous of Breadon, not only because of his relationship to Crystal but is also threatened by him and his appearance. Their competitive nature is seen in the story, particularly when Breadon overtakes Malcolm's control of the life skiff; the two bicker and fumble over the control of the aircraft, and the life skiff ends up crashing onto Titan. Malcolm commends Breadon for keeping the members alive, but Breadon blames him for the crash, though it was his own sleeve being caught on the control that caused it. Though Malcolm and Breadon have problems with each other, Malcolm is more obedient and tries to avoid additional conflict. "}
{"id": "63048_3", "pid": "63048_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Malcolm and Breadon?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30245, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "We learn from the beginning of the story, Crystal, J. Foster Andrews\u2019 daughter, is engaged to Breadon. However, Malcolm seems to like her as well, but there\u2019s nothing he can do. Later when Malcolm is talking about the phenomenon of the vortex, Breadon is the first that realizes what Malcolm is implying with the ionized filed. Then, when Hannigan tells them to board the life-skiff, both of them are able to get on it. Malcolm has the control of the life-skiff at first, but then Breadon asks to take over. Just as he is doing that, his sleeve catches the control key and turns the engine off. The ship begins to lose control, and Breadon grabs everyone\u2019s hand off the control except for his. With his skills and training, finally, he is able to land without injuring anyone. Greg is surprised, since he did not believe they could actually be saved. He complements Breadon \u201cnice work,\u201d but Breadon blames him for crashing the ship. So then Hannigan decides to stand up for Malcolm where he asks Breadon if he know which part of what planet they are on. Breadon stuttered, and then Malcolm simply stated that they are on the northern hemisphere of Titan, one of Saturn\u2019s satellite."}
{"id": "63048_3", "pid": "63048_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Malcolm and Breadon?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30245, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gregory Malcolm is described as tall and neat, wearing a business suit. He is the secretary of J. Foster Andrews. Ralph Breadon is a socialite and sportsman with previous training as a pilot. He is described as a sturdy man with eyes, hair, and skin the color of chestnuts. Crystal, Andrew\u2019s daughter is pledged to Ralph Breadon. Malcolm is attracted and has feelings towards Crystal, the girl that is meant to be with Breadon. Breadon belittles Malcolm throughout the story. Malcolm does not respond with disdain or anger towards Breadon, instead, he remains calm and obedient. He acknowledges that Breadon has some competencies and skills related to piloting. Malcolm eventually proves to the group that he has more knowledge than Breadon when he is able to approximate their location on Titan. "}
{"id": "63048_4", "pid": "63048_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between the Andrews family and those in their employ?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30270, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Generally, the Andrews family is dismissive of their household staff, which include Gregory Malcolm, \u2018Tina Laney, Sparks, and a cabin-boy. J. Foster Andrews, the head of the family, impatiently calls for his secretary, Gregory Malcolm, to complain about the quality of their morning honey. J. Foster learns that Malcolm doesn\u2019t know that state of the Galactic market, but dismisses the reason that Malcolm provides, instead concluding that the radio technician Sparks is drunk. \n\tDuring the evacuation to the life skiff, Crystal Andrews, J. Foster\u2019s daughter, remembers her maid \u2018Tina Laney and asks where she is, apparently paying mind to her safety. In contrast, her fianc\u00e9 Ralph Breadon is dismissive of Malcolm, and later blames him for the life skiff\u2019s crashing into Titan. Upon the cabin-boy\u2019s revelation that it was, in fact, Breadon who inadvertently caused the skiff\u2019s malfunction, Breadon strikes the cabin-boy. \n\tOn Titan, \u2018Tina is instructed to remove things from the skiff by the women of the Andrews family, who do not help, and Sparks and Malcolm are harshly instructed to make themselves useful. "}
{"id": "63048_4", "pid": "63048_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between the Andrews family and those in their employ?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30270, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Andrews family resembles a royal one; they are wealthy and own the monopoly of Galactic Metals Corporation, with over ten thousand employees. The Andrews family is aware of their wealth and power, and treat their employees as significantly inferior to them. They also believe that any problems that arise are due to their employers, and insist that their products are perfect enough to not be subject to any problems. This is shown in the story when Malcolm first sees the Andrews family to update them on the situation at hand, and J. Foster Andrews expects his workers to be able to resolve the issue themselves. "}
{"id": "63048_4", "pid": "63048_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between the Andrews family and those in their employ?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30270, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Andrews family seem to have different attitudes towards their employees. Through the first part of the story, we see that at first J. Foster Andrews is not paying much attention to Greg, who is his employee, even when speaking with him. J. Foster Andrews simply replies \u201cfine\u201d to Greg\u2019s answer of no transmission. Then he realizes what Greg is actually saying and then without allowing Greg to explain what he means by no transmission and how it has happened, he continues to scold them and order Greg to do things. Maud Andres tells him to stop and lets Greg explain himself. Greg on the other hand is very polite. He greets the Andrews family when entering the dining room, and thanks Miss Andrews for letting him to explain himself. On the contrary, later in the story, Breadon does not thank Greg even when he complements Breadon, instead, Breadon just accuses him for the crash just because he touched the control. But still, Greg is being very polite and calm, and it is in strong contrast to Breadon\u2019s anger and rudeness. Lastly, in the end, the readers see that Maud Andrews, the sister of J. Foster Andrews, is very surprised when she hears that Greg knows where they are. "}
{"id": "63048_4", "pid": "63048_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between the Andrews family and those in their employ?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30270, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "J. Foster Andrews employs around ten thousand people for his Galactic Metals Corporation. He is described as Napoleonic, especially when talking towards his employees. He is loud and demanding towards Malcolm and interrupts him many times when he speaks. His sister Maud even remarks that he has to give Malcolm a chance to respond. Maud inquisitively judges Malcolm and the other employees. When the ship is about to crash and everybody is rushing towards the life skiff, the Andrews family has more regard for their pets or fights than for saving others on the ship. \n\nAndrew continuously commands orders from his employees and has no patience for anything but extreme obedience from them. The rest of the family continues to demand the employees take after them once they leave the ship after their crash landing. They are more concerned about their own comfort than the well-being of the employees. Both Ralph and J. Foster take action trying to one-up one another in an attempt to show their power over their employees. Neither wants to be a fool. At the end of the story when Malcolm is able to approximate their location, Maud, a member of the Andrews family, is taken aback by Malcolm's discovery. She reacts as if she is surprised an employee could be smart.\n"}
{"id": "63048_5", "pid": "63048_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30224, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\tThe story begins in the control room of J. Foster Andrews\u2019s space yacht the Carefree, and then proceeds to the dining room. Outside of the Carefreem is a dynamic, glittering web of bright violet light, in stark contrast to the typical black of space. \n\tAs the members of the Andrews family and their household staff escape the Carefree onto a life skiff, the setting changes to the atmosphere of the moon Titan. Now free of the vortex which caused the shimmering lights, the space around their skiff is dark. \n\tAfter their uncontrolled descent onto Titan, the passengers of the skiff find themselves at the foot of a ring of shallow mountains, standing on rough soil. The mountains above are green and lush, with periodic caves along their face. In the sky is an image of Saturn, which causes the gravitational pull on the planet to be similar to Earth\u2019s. More broadly, Titan, the moon they are on, is uninhabited and rarely visited. \n"}
{"id": "63048_5", "pid": "63048_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30224, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on the Andrews' family ship. The ship has multiple rooms; Malcolm and Sparks spend their time operating the ship while the Andrews family stays in the dining dome, a much more comfortable and luxurious room. However, once the ship is in distress and close to crashing, everyone on the ship must move to the independent life skiff, a smaller cramped unit. The crew eventually crashes onto the planet Titan, a mountainous, green, cavern-filled planet, though threatening in its uncertainty and lack of colonies. In the atmosphere, Saturn is visible above them, and the gravity is similar to that on Earth."}
{"id": "63048_5", "pid": "63048_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30224, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story first takes place on a ship which has been in a vortex for more than eight hours. It has lost all its radio signals in and out. They are unsure of when they will be toss out, nor the place that they will be tossed out at. Then the readers follow Greg into the dining room where J. Foster Andrews, his family and some others are eating. There he is asked about the communication which he responds with no communication at all. He starts to explain when Hannigan came into the room and tells everyone to get on the life-skiff since the ship is about to crash. Once they get on to the life-skiff, however, because Breadon accidentally hits the control keys with his sleeve, which turns of the motors and they go directly towards the ground. Luckily Breadon is talented and skilled, he is able to perform the miracle that makes the life-skiff bounced and finally landed, without injuring anyone. Even though the life-skiff is a bit broken, it is not too big of a deal. As everyone got off the life-skiff, Breadon calls them together and tells Hannigan to send signals to the nearest space cruiser. Hannigan suggests to him that they aren\u2019t even sure where they are, and the signal system are broken. Then the story ends with Greg telling them that they are on the northern hemisphere of Titan, one of the satellites of Mars. "}
{"id": "63048_5", "pid": "63048_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWanderers of the Wolf Moon\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary\u2014whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. \"If I was you,\" he said, \"if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow.\"\n \n Greg said, \"Why not?\"\n \n Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.\n \n \"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this\u2014plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree .\"\n \n Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, \"So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?\"\n \n \"What bad? I just told you\u2014\"\n \n \"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.\n \n \"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?\"\n \n \"I don't know what\u2014\" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. \"O.Q.,\" he confessed, \"that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family.\"\n \n \"I won't tell them,\" said Greg. \"I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?\"\n \n The radioman shrugged.\n \n \"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens.\"\n \n \"And the controls?\"\n \n \"As useless,\" said Sparks, \"as a cow in a cyclone.\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"We sit tight,\" said Sparks succinctly, \"and hope.\"\n \n Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. \"Well,\" he said, \"that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome.\"\n \n Sparks stared at him querulously.\n \n \"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body.\"\n \n \"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford,\" replied Greg. \"If anything happens\u2014and if there's time to do so\u2014let me know.\" He paused at the door. \"Good luck,\" he said.\n \n \"Clear ether!\" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.\n \n \n\n \n Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.\n \n He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.\n \n His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.\n \n On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at\u2014guessed Greg\u2014the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.\n \n She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of \"Cuddles.\"\n \n On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision\u2014all gold and crimson and cream\u2014in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.\n \n But\u2014Greg shook his head\u2014but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.\n \n The sound of his own name startled Greg.\n \n \"Malcolm!\" called the man at the head of the table. \"Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?\" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. \"Bitter!\" he complained.\n \n \"It's the very best Martian honey,\" said his wife.\n \n \"Drylands clover,\" added Crystal.\n \n \"It's still bitter,\" said J. Foster petulantly.\n \n His sister sniffed. \"Nonsense! It's delightful.\"\n \n \"I say it's bitter,\" repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. \" Malcolm! Where are you?\"\n \n \"You called me, sir?\" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. \"Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon....\"\n \n \"Oh, sit down!\" snapped J. Foster. \"Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter.\" He glared at his sister challengingly. \"Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?\"\n \n Malcolm said, \"I don't know, sir.\"\n \n \"Fine! Fine!\" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. \"Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to\u2014\"\n \n \"There's no transmission, sir,\" said Greg quietly.\n \n \"No trans\u2014nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. \"Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?\" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. \" That? \"\n \n She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.\n \n Greg nodded. \"Yes, Miss Andrews.\"\n \n Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.\n \n \"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?\"\n \n \"You might call it that,\" said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.\n\"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It\u2014it\u2014shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out.\"\n \n Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.\n \n \"Ionization! That means atmosphere!\"\n \n Greg said, \"Yes.\"\n \n \"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near\u2014\" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. \"Oh, well\u2014a change of scenery, what?\"\n \n But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.\n \n \"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there\u2014danger?\"\n \n But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.\n \n \"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks\u2014are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see\u2014and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!\"\n \n The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, \"Mr. Andrews\u2014\" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.\n \n \"Bert\u2014you're drunk!\"\n \n Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.\n \n \"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!\" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. \"You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do\u2014hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!\" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.\n \n J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.\n \n \"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?\"\n \n Greg said soberly, \"Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger\u2014but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.\"\n \n Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.\n \n \"Is there anything we can do?\"\n \n \"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.\"\n \n \"In that case,\" said the older woman, \"we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!\" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,\n\"The life-skiffs?\"\n \n \"A last resort,\" said Greg. \"Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not\u2014\"\n \n But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.\n \n \"Everybody\u2014the Number Four life-skiff\u2014 quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.\n \n He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, \"Cuddles! I forgot him!\" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.\n \n J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, \"The officers?\" and his own unfelt assurance. \"They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship.\" Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,\n\"'Tina!\" ... and Hannigan's reply, \"Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff.\" Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.\n \n Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.\n \n Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.\n \n Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .\n \n Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.\n \n For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....\n \n And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.\n \n Hannigan said, \"It's over?\" and Greg nodded.\n \n Hannigan said, \"The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure.\"\n \n \"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?\"\n \n \"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.\"\n \n Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. \"I'll take over now, Malcolm.\"\n \n \n\n \n It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now\u2014\n \n And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....\n \n \"Very well, sir,\" he said. And he turned over the controls.\n \n What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.\n \n The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's\u2014and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.\n \n In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.\n \n Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.\n \n \n\n \n Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.\n \n Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. \"Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce\u2014\"\n \n Then they struck!\n \n But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.\n \n Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. \"Nice work, Mr. Breadon!\" he cried. \"Oh, nice work!\"\n \n But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.\n \n \"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only\u2014\"\n \n \"He didn't do it!\" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. \"You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch.\"\n \n \"Quiet!\" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. \"And you, Malcolm\u2014after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is.\"\n \n Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.\n \n He said quietly, \"Very well, Mr. Breadon.\" And he climbed from the broken skiff.\n \n \n\n \n Hannigan said, \"Looks bad, don't it?\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. \"Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that\u2014\"\n \n \"You ought to of poked him,\" said Hannigan.\n \n \"What? Oh, you mean\u2014?\"\n \n \"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it.\"\n \n \"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident,\" said Greg. \"It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow\u2014\" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. \"Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering\u2014\"\n \n \"Umbrage!\" snorted Sparks. \"Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything .\" He glanced at Greg oddly. \"You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero\u2014for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk\u2014\"\n \n Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, \"Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering.\"\n \n \"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?\"\n \n Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.\n \n The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted \"something\" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.\n \n J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who\u2014as Greg watched\u2014stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.\n \n 'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews\n(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!\n \n Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.\n \n \"You see what I mean?\" demanded Sparks disgustedly.\n \n \n\n \n Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.\n \n He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things\u2014\n \n He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.\n \n \"Titan,\" he said. \"Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan.\"\n \n Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.\n \n \"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?\"\n \n \"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull.\"\n \n Sparks wailed, \"But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. \"And, hey\u2014this place is dangerous ! There are\u2014\"\n \n \"I know it,\" said Greg swiftly, quietly. \"Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way\u2014\"\n \n Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. \"Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!\"\n \n And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. \"Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!\"\n \n Sparks said, \"Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!\" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.\n \n \"Yes, sir,\" he said.\n \n Hannigan groaned and followed him.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Breadon said, \"All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say.\" He glanced about him pompously. \"Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser.\"\n \n Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, \"A message, huh?\"\n \n \"That's what I said.\"\n \n \"And what'll I send it with?\" drawled Sparks. \"Tom-toms?\"\n \n Breadon flushed darkly.\n \n \"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?\"\n \n \"Finest radio money can buy!\" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.\n\"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout.\"\n \n Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. \"You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch\u2014\"\n \n \"That will do!\" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. \"You mean the radio was broken?\"\n \n \"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good.\"\n \n Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, \"Sparks, can't you fix it?\"\n \n \"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it.\"\n \n Breadon frowned.\n \n \"I'll handle this, Malcolm,\" he crisped. Again to the radioman, \"Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are\u2014\"\n \n \"Speaking of which,\" insinuated Sparks, \"where are we?\"\n \n Breadon glared at him wrathfully.\n \n \"Why\u2014why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!\"\n \n \"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees.\"\n \n Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, \"I\u2014I don't know. We have a compass\u2014\"\n \n Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, \"I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite.\"\n \n Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.\n \n \"How,\" she asked, \"did you know that, Malcolm?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30180, "query_start_index": 30182, "query_end_index": 30224, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on the yacht named Carefree, owned by J. Foster Andrews. The ship is stuck in a typhoon that is causing the ship to be twisted and directed towards an unknown location. Carefree has been caught in the space vortex for hours and the ship ends up in the H-layer of an unknown planet. As the ship is about to crash, a group swarm towards a life skiff. The life skiff is forty feet. The life skiff crash lands on one of the satellites of Saturn, on Titan, in the northern hemisphere.  "}
{"id": "50998_1", "pid": "50998_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30360, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Denton Cassal is a sales engineer of Neuronics, Inc., from Earth. On a business trip to Tunney 21, he awaits his next ship on the planet of Godolph. One evening, Cassal is warned by Dimanche, an informative electronic companion, that he is being stalked by a man. The man's motives are not completely known, but according to Dimanche, the man is intending to murder Cassal. One thing is known, which is that the man's objective is related to Cassal being stranded on Godolph. As it begins to rain heavily, Cassal attempts to evade the man with the help of Dimanche; he follows a Godolphian girl and turns into an alleyway. As they pass by the man, Dimanche notes that he is becoming increasingly suspicious. Cassal leads the man into an alleyway, and as the dusk turns to darkness, Dimanche assists him in dodging and fighting the man. With a lighter-turned-knife, Cassal is able to attack the man and stab him several times. According to Dimanche, the man is presumed dead, although moments later the man strangles Cassal and steals his wallet. The next day, Cassal visits the Travelers Aid Bureau, where Murra Foray, the First Counselor, prods him for information, including why he is on his way to Tunney 21. Avoiding the question, Cassal asks about the status of the next ship to Tunney 21. He learns that the ship departed from Godolph that morning, and that someone named Denton Cassal did board it; he then realizes that the man who attacked him the night before used the identification from his wallet to board that ship. Stranded and uncertain of how long he would have to wait for another ship, Cassal is out of options. He contributes a donation to the bureau as he leaves. Dimanche reports that he tried to gather information on Foray, but only got her home planet, as electronic guards were blocking the rest of the information, which Dimanche finds suspicious. On his way out of the agency, Cassal encounters a man that works for Traveler's Aid, but flees after being asked about Murra Foray. Cassal continues on as he remains stranded on Godolph. "}
{"id": "50998_1", "pid": "50998_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30360, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Cassal concerned about someone following him. His electronic device alerts him that there is potential danger and directs him to walk down an alley. Cassal acknowledges that an alley is not the best choice to walk down if he is concerned about his safety. The person who was following him attacks him. Cassal is able to fend him off but his wallet is stolen. \n\nCassal begins to grow impatient because his ship has not arrived in weeks. He walks towards the Travel Agency Bureau to get counseling advice for his plan to go to Tunney 21. Marra talks about how unlikely it will be that he gets to planet Tunney 21. The ship that he was meant to be on, he did not make because he did not know when it would arrive. Marra tells him that there might not be another ship headed towards Tunney 21 for another 5 years. Even then, Cassal would not be able to board the ship without identification as the region Tunney 21 requires everyone who steps off the ship to present identification. Cassal becomes upset at this news and realizes why the man had attacked him \u2013 the man wanted Casals\u2019s identification. Marra agrees to help Cassal for a price and Cassal agrees to the deal.\n\nWhen Cassal leaves the building, he asks an old man about his boss, Marra. The man becomes scared and does not answer Cassal, instead, he walks away. Cassal finds the old man\u2019s behavior curious. \n"}
{"id": "50998_1", "pid": "50998_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30360, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Denton Cassal is a sales engineer who was selected to see a man at Tunney 21. The story starts with Dimanche talking to Cassel where Dimanche is warning him that there could be a stalker who is harmful to him. After further analysis, Dimanche believed that the guy stalking him had murder in mind. Dimanche is a device that is designed on Earth and it\u2019s able to analyze people. Then the readers learn that Cassal is on Godolph, a transfer center for the stars that are located near the center of the Galaxy. And Cassel is here to transfer from Earth to Tunney 21. He was supposed to get on the ship after a few days of landing in Godolph, but apparently the ship has not arrived and it has been almost three weeks. Hearing Dimanche\u2019s analysis on the man\u2019s connection to the delay, Cassal gets curious. \n\nThen Cassal is suggested by Dimanche to follow a girl in order to get closer to the stalker. Then he gets to a deserted intersection holding his cigarette so that the guy will follow, which he does. Because Godolphian won\u2019t be seen when it\u2019s dark, but they can see Cassal very well, so Dimanche becomes Cassal\u2019s eyes once they entered the intersection. Cassal listens to him and follows his instructions. Luckily he is able to get the distance correct to injure the guy. Right after that, to Cassal\u2019s surprise, Dimanche detects no heartbeat and the guy is not breathing anymore. Despite that he is horrified by the fact he has just murdered someone, Cassal wants to figure out who wants the man to attack him. So he looks through the man\u2019s wallet and other personal items, but could find no connection. Then suddenly the supposed-to-be-dead man attacks Cassal and then runs away with his wallet. \n\nLater, Cassal found himself inside the travelers aid bureau answering questions in order to get a consultation. During the consultation, he realizes that he just missed the ship. Moreover, someone used his identity to get on to that ship. Then, Murra Foray, the first counselor of the travelers aid bureau offers him help if he donates to them. He is surprised by the amount they wish for, but he donates anyways. Then after he exits from the other side of the building, he sees a man who finishes with putting up the signs. But somehow he would not talk about Murra Foray as if he is afraid of her, which Cassal does not understand at all. "}
{"id": "50998_1", "pid": "50998_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30360, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "On the planet Godolph, Neronics, Inc., salesman Denton Cassal is being stalked by a mysterious local. An intelligent implanted machine able to detect and interpret physiological data of nearby individuals, which Cassal calls Dimanche, tells him that the man likely intends to murder him. Dimanche gathers that the assassin's motivation is connected to Cassal\u2019s being stranded on Godolph; Cassal had initially meant to stay in Godolph for only a couple days before continuing his journey to Tunney 21, but has been stuck there for several weeks. \nCassal moves closer to the man in order for Dimanche to better analyze him; Dimanche reveals that the man wields a concealed knife. Instructing Cassal to turn into an alley, Dimanche learns that the man expressed regret about having to kill Cassal, saying that one of them had to die. Suddenly, the assailant rushes Cassal, who narrowly dodges and deploys a hidden blade. Dimanche guides Cassal, whose eyes are unable to see in the dim Godolphian light, in a fight against the man, and Cassal seemingly dispatches the man. However, he quickly recovers and tackles Cassal, managing to steal his wallet and identification tab before running off. \n\tNow at the Travelers Aid Bureau, where an old technician is changing signs throughout the building, Cassal waits to enter a counseling room to ask about his onward journey to Tunney 21. Through a screen, he speaks with Murra Foray, who asks that he complete an onboarding questionnaire. He answers all the required questions, except for one which asks for his purpose in traveling to Tunney. We learn that Cassal aims to persuade a Tunnesian scientist to come to Earth in order to develop instantaneous radio, which would make them very wealthy. \n\tMurra reveals that the transport for which Cassal had been waiting had departed that morning, and that a man named Denton Cassal had been aboard it. Cassal concludes that his assailant from the previous night had stolen his identification tab with the intention of traveling to Tunney 21. Murra understands Cassal\u2019s situation, and elicits a contribution from him in exchange for the Travelers Aid Bureau\u2019s assistance. Throughout their conversation, Murra seems to bait Cassal into revealing his secret to success as a salesman; because of his possession of Dimanche, Cassal is able to successfully interpret his customers\u2019 reactions. However, Cassal is wary of Murra\u2019s line of questioning and reveals nothing. \n\tAs Cassal leaves the counseling room, he runs into the old man changing the signs, who reveals that Murra has recently assumed control of the Bureau. Cassal sees that the technician is afraid of Murra, but thinks nothing of it.\n"}
{"id": "50998_2", "pid": "50998_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Dimanche, and how is he used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30379, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dimanche is a device attached to Cassal's ear that is able to collect physiological data on a person, including nervous systems and physical reactions to stimuli. In addition, Dimanche is able to understand what people \"subvocalize\", or think to themselves in their subconscious. In the story, Dimanche's abilities are shown when he is able to read the thoughts of Cassal's attacker as well as his body's reactions to Cassal's movements, such as his heart rate and blood pressure. Dimanche's features also give Cassal an advantage in his work as a salesperson, as he is able to gauge people's thoughts, motives, and desires. Dimanche is a secret kept from the rest of the galaxy, and Cassal is hesitant to tell others about his abilities."}
{"id": "50998_2", "pid": "50998_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Dimanche, and how is he used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30379, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dimanche is an electronic instrument that was invented on Earth. Cassal refers to Dimanche as a device. It is a secret instrument that very few know about. It has the ability to scan the nervous systems of individuals at short distances to collect and interpret data. He is used in the story to analyze the data that he collects from people nearby to complete a report of what a person says and thinks inside of their head. "}
{"id": "50998_2", "pid": "50998_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Dimanche, and how is he used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30379, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dimanche is a device invented on Earth to help Cassal analyze people. Dimanche is first used to help Cassel notice a man that is stalking him, Dimanche gives his analysis and interpretations about that man, confirming his intention. Dimanche believes that there is some connection between the delay in the transit ship to Tunney 21 and the stalker. So Cassal decides to let the guy find him and see what he is trying to do. When the guy tries to hurt Cassal, Dimanche helps him to fight the man since Cassal cannot see the guy after dark. With Dimanche\u2019s information, Cassal is able to stab the guy. Then he realizes that he has accidentally killed him after Dimanche found no heartbeat and he is not breathing. But neither Dimanche nor Cassal is aware of their ability to pretend to be dead. So before Cassal could react to Dimanche\u2019s warning, he gets hit and his wallet is stolen by the guy. \n\nLater at the travelers aid bureau, we learn that Dimanche is quite crucial to bring the researcher back to Earth. Moreover, Dimanche thought there\u2019s something weird about the Murra Foray, the first counselor of the travelers aid bureau, but he could not identify anything else before  the electric guards slide into place. "}
{"id": "50998_2", "pid": "50998_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Dimanche, and how is he used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30379, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dimanche is a device implanted next to the bone behind Denton Cassal\u2019s ear which is able to detect various things about people in proximity to him. Among these things are heart rate, neural index, mental state, and motivation. An intelligent machine, Dimanche is also able to determine any concealed weapons, and can silently communicate with Cassal. Dimanche is an example of the advanced technology of Earth, and Cassal hopes to demonstrate it to a scientist on Tunney 21 to convince him to join Neuronics Inc., in developing instantaneous radio. \n\tCassal employs Dimanche\u2019s capabilities several times throughout the story, often without giving explicit instructions. It is first employed in assessing the mental states and likely motivations of Cassal\u2019s assailant. Dimanche is able to locate the assailant when Cassal\u2019s eyes, in virtue of the poor lighting, could not, and is able to communicate his location to Cassal. Later, Dimanche is used in the Traveler\u2019s Aid Bureau to gather information about Murra Fora, but, as it reaches her, electronic guards prevent it from gathering any information other than her planet of origin. \n"}
{"id": "50998_3", "pid": "50998_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Cassal on his way to Tunney 21?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30368, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Cassal is sent on a business trip by Neuronics, Inc., to visit Tunney 21 to see a man. Tunney 21, according to the first counselor, is home to some of the galaxy's most genius scientists. It is later revealed that Neuronics, Inc. wants that man on their staff back on Earth. The man would work towards the company's goal of developing instantaneous radio; this radio system would impact the entire galaxy, technology that could share information with every planet with no time delay. This radio would dominate means of transportation, communications, and commerce. For these reasons, Cassal is not eager to disclose his plans for going to Tunney 21."}
{"id": "50998_3", "pid": "50998_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Cassal on his way to Tunney 21?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30368, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Denton Cassal was selected to make the journey to Tunney 21 because he is the best sales engineer at Neuronics, Inc. He is secretive about why he wants to go to Tunney 21. He reveals that he wants to go to Tunney 21 to find a research worker that could help Neuronics perfect their instantaneous radio. If he were able to convince the researcher to go to Earth and work on the radio, he would get a share of the profits. An instantaneous radio would be invaluable throughout the galaxy, the profits for both Neuronics and him would be large. "}
{"id": "50998_3", "pid": "50998_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Cassal on his way to Tunney 21?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30368, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Cassal is a sales engineer back on Earth where he did very good since he matched very well to his instrument. Thus he was selected to go on a trip to see a man. Since this man is at Tunney 21, Cassal has to travel all the way from Earth to Tunney 21. Tunney 21 has great scientists and especially the one that works on Neuronics. If Earth can get his help, then Earth will have perfect instantaneous radio that span the whole Galaxy. Because of its monopoly in instantaneousness and vastness, Earth can literally set its own price. Thus, for this trip to Tunney 21, with the help of Dimanche, Cassal needs to persuade the researcher to come with him to Earth. This way he can also gain profit from the instantaneous radio which will be build afterward."}
{"id": "50998_3", "pid": "50998_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is Cassal on his way to Tunney 21?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30368, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Cassal is on his way to Tunney 21 in order to convince a Tunnesian scientist to join his company, Neuronics. From the pieces of the scientist\u2019s research that had reached Earth, it was concluded that he would be instrumental in perfecting instantaneous radio, a technology which would revolutionize communication in the galaxy. Neuronics aims to monopolize the technology and amass great wealth, from which Cassal would receive a commission.\nCassal, because of his possession of Dimanche, an intelligent implant capable of determining the thoughts of those nearby, is in a good position to negotiate terms with the scientist for two reasons: firstly because he will be able to guess the Tunnesian\u2019s price, and secondly because Dimanche\u2019s sophisticated technology will convince him that Earth is an advanced civilization.\n"}
{"id": "50998_4", "pid": "50998_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Murra Foray and how is she significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Murra Foray is the First Counselor of the Traveler's Aid Bureau on Godolph. Little is known about her personally, other than the fact that she is a Huntner, a people from across the Galaxy. Foray was an intimidating, cold woman, who was particularly curious about Cassal. Upon Cassal's arrival, she interrogates him about his personal life before offering help. Additionally, once Cassal realizes he had missed the ship to Tunney 21, and is stranded on Godolph, Murra Foray offers little support or sympathy. Instead, she reprimands him for lack of identification and nevertheless presses for a financial contribution. Foray is a mysterious character, whose motives are questioned, especially by Dimanche; while Dimanche is usually able to read people, Foray had electronic guards protecting information, indicating that the Traveler's Aid Bureau is hiding something."}
{"id": "50998_4", "pid": "50998_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Murra Foray and how is she significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Murra Foray is the First Counselor at Travelers Aid Bureau. She is significant to the story because Cassal goes to her for help because he is unsure where the ship is that is supposed to take him to Tunney 21. She is described as being cool, clean, and with bright eyes. She is possibly younger than Cassal. Murra informs Cassal that without his identification card, no ship would be willing to let him board as identification is necessary to leave the ship in the region that Tunney 21 is located. She describes the Travelers Aid Bureau as a philanthropic agency that can help him solve his issue, for a price. She informs him that they will keep him informed. \n\nDimanche assesses Murra and claims that she is a Huntner, which is a sub-race of men that are located on the other side of the galaxy. Dimanche was not able to gather more information because she was blocking him from collecting data. After Cassal questions an old man about Murra, he receives a jarring reaction that he waves off without concern. \n"}
{"id": "50998_4", "pid": "50998_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Murra Foray and how is she significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Murra Foray is the first counselor of the travelers aid bureau, she looks enigmatic and dangerous. At first, she is doubtful about Cassel\u2019s destination to Tunney 21 and his occupation as a sales engineer. She points out that there are a thousand races, how is Cassal able to have special knowledge of all those different types of customers. \n\nLater she tells Cassal that his ship has already left in the morning. And no one is sure when the next ship will be coming to Godolph. Murra suggests five years if lucky. Star hopping would also take that much of time since he has only covered one third of the whole distance. Then later Murra realizes that someone has already boarded the ship under Cassal\u2019s name, using Cassal\u2019s identification. Now the stalker\u2019s motive of stealing his wallet becomes clear. Then Murra suggests that he donate to the bureau so that they will help him with his special case, which he did. Afterwards, Dimanche suggest that Murra is a Huntner. But before Dimanche can learn anything else, the electronic guards stopped him. Outside the building of the bureau, Cassal learned that even the old man switching the signs on the building is afraid of Murra Foray. "}
{"id": "50998_4", "pid": "50998_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Murra Foray and how is she significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Murra Foray is the new first counselor at the Travelers Aid Bureau on Godolph. She is a Huntner, a sub-race of humans from the other side of the galaxy. First appearing on a screen in a Bureau counseling room in which the protagonist Denton Cassal enters, she asks him to fill out a questionnaire. Cassal is unable to determine her age, but comments that she is taller than average, lean, and has a broad face that narrows at her chin. \n\tMurra asks Cassal why he has not answered the question about the purpose of his onward journey to Tunney 21, and speculates that it is to recruit a scientist for his company. She reveals to him that the transport for which he had been waiting had already departed, and offers her help in arranging alternate transportation to Tunney. She elicits a monetary donation from Cassal before terminating their conversation. \n\tAs Cassal leaves the counseling room, he encounters an old technician who seems afraid of Murra. \n"}
{"id": "50998_5", "pid": "50998_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30364, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place in a city on Godolph, a planet that acts as a transfer location in between stars. Godolph is a threatening and violent city, not safe for ordinary humans. A unique feature of Godolph is that its environment is specifically catered to natives, where the weather is controlled, often with heavy rain. The city is compared to Venice, where water is used as a mode of transport and essential to engineering. Additionally, at dusk the city becomes dark for travelers, but bright for its natives. "}
{"id": "50998_5", "pid": "50998_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30364, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Godolph, in a Godolphian city. Violence occurs in these cities and they typically shut down at dusk. Being a human pedestrian at night is not a safe option. Cassal is on Godolph as it is in between Earth, which he left, and Tunney 21, where he intends to go. He describes Godolph as a backwards planet.  As Cassal is walking on the street, there is a tide of water that is used by Godolphian\u2019s as a transportation network. He is walking in the rain as that is the type of weather preferred by Godolphian\u2019s. \n\nCassal heads down an alley at the direction of Dimanche. The alley is narrow and dark with a slow-moving, oily type of water jutting from one side and large walls standing overhead on the other side. \n\nEventually, Cassal finds himself at the Travelers Aid Bureau. The building is shaped like a square block. The Bureau was similar to a maze inside with many small counseling rooms. A\n\nCassal is only 1/3 of the distance to Tunnel 21. \n"}
{"id": "50998_5", "pid": "50998_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30364, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set at the place called Godolph. Godolph is the place that travelers transfer from a star that is located further from the Galaxy to the stars that are located near the center of the Galaxy. The story follows Cassal as he walk to the deserted intersection to fight with the guy since Dimanche suggests that there is a connection between him and the delay in his ship. After fighting with the guy, he gets the guys wallet but loses his. Without his identification, he comes to the travelers aid bureau. Here he has to answer questions in order to get a consultation. And during the consultation he learns about missing the ship and about someone who boarded the ship using his identity. Then the story ends with him walking out of the bureau building and asking an old man about Murra Foray, but apparently he is too afraid to answer him. "}
{"id": "50998_5", "pid": "50998_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDELAY IN TRANSIT\n \n \n By F. L. WALLACE\n \n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n \n\n \n \"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n \n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n \n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n \n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display.\"\n \n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy.\n \n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n \n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage.\n \n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in mind.\"\n \n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time.\n \n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted\u2014for native eyes. A human would consider it dim.\n \n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be something he hopes to gain.\"\n \n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police.\"\n \n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n \n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either.\n \n \"Weapons?\"\n \n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n \n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself.\n \n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence.\"\n \n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n \n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n \n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n \n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be.\n \n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\n \n \n\n \n Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n \n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want?\n \n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n \n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk.\n \n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n \n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain.\n \n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it.\n \n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human\u2014Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age.\n \n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human\u2014Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place.\n \n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n \n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at closer range.\"\n \n \n\n \n Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though.\n \n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n \n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite.\"\n \n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n \n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n \n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?\"\n \n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n \n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there.\n \n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other.\n \n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n \n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n \n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now.\"\n \n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n\"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical.\"\n \n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality.\n \n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n \n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light.\"\n \n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n \n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?\"\n \n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn around.\"\n \n \n\n \n Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n \n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by.\n \n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n \n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n \n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n \n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n \n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n \n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n \n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall.\n \n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet. Low.\"\n \n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away.\n \n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid.\"\n \n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n \n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move.\n \n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely perceptible.\"\n \n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n \n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face.\n \n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\n \n \n\n \n Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it?\n \n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n21?\n \n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n \n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body data\u2014a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n \n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n \n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21.\n \n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n \n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground.\n \n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water.\n \n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight.\n \n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by.\"\n \n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n \n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police.\n \n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n \n Something, however, was missing\u2014his wallet.\n \n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n \n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had.\n \n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab.\n \n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\n \n \n\n \n The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door.\n \n \n TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor\n \n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n \n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n \n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n \n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation.\"\n \n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n \n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n\"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n \n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to the first counselor.\"\n \n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the screen.\n \n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n \n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at\u2014why he wanted to go to Tunney\n21 was his own business.\n \n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\n \n \n\n \n She glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n \n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations.\"\n \n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows arched.\n \n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n \n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n \n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n \n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them.\"\n \n Close\u2014but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely.\n \n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade\u2014a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that.\n \n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor.\n \n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n \n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n21.\"\n \n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \" Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n \n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will the next ship arrive?\"\n \n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n \n\n \n \"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years\u2014maybe.\"\n \n \n\n \n He blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?\"\n \n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n \n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n \n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab.\"\n \n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n \n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n \n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification\u2014\" She arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n \n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name!\n \n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n \n Presently she returned.\n \n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n \n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to\u2014\" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything.\n \n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n \n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it.\n \n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n \n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\n \n \n\n \n She was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming.\n \n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced\u2014\"\n \n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any trouble.\"\n \n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide\u2014why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n \n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you?\n \n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n \n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n\"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration.\"\n \n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone.\n \n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n \n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n \n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\n \n \n\n \n The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor.\n \n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is special, though\u2014\"\n \n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n \n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time.\n \n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to.\"\n \n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians.\"\n \n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n \n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly\u2014\"\n \n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n \n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line.\"\n \n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better as a salesman.\"\n \n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all\u2014\"\n \n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n \n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient.\n \n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n \n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical.\n \n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau.\n \n \n\n \n \"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named.\n \n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n \n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n \n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n \n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n \n \"Any other information?\"\n \n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing.\n \n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n \n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times.\n \n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered.\n \n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n \n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n\"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new.\"\n \n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n \n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n \n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n \n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30318, "query_start_index": 30320, "query_end_index": 30364, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The first scene of the story takes place on the poorly illuminated streets of the planet Godolph. The natives of the planet have sensitive eyes, and as a result the streets appear dimly lit for human eyes. It rains often on Godolph, whose climate is controlled by its amphibian inhabitants who are fond of rain. A means of transportation on Godolph is the transport tide, rapidly moving water which carries Godolphian natives to their destination quickly and quietly. In the scene where Cassal is confronted by an assailant, there is oily water moving on one side of a narrow alley, and high walls on the opposite side. \n\tThe second half of the story is set in the labyrinthine Travelers Aid Bureau, whose busy corridors are pocketed with small counseling rooms. In each counseling room is a small door into which visitors can deposit contributions to the agency. \n"}
{"id": "51152_1", "pid": "51152_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31456, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Following World War III at the end of the 20th century, American society is dependent upon a machine created by the Thinker's Foundation; this machine, named Maizie, has the ability to answer any question posed to it, and it is used often by politicians and public figures for societal decision making. Jorj Helmuth, a Thinker with hypnotic abilities, awakes with a girl, Caddy, asleep beside him. Jorj is struck with a revelation about new developments in his work towards space domination, and he sends a letter to a group of physicists calling for a meeting later that afternoon. Jorj is then alerted that the President has arrived to consult Maizie. He commences the daily procedure of feeding the machine questions through a tape, and meanwhile attention turns to a broadcast of a rocket taking off to Mars. The Secretary of Space, who joined the President, is wary of his exclusion in this project, but disregards it as he credits Maizie for the decision. Jorj discloses that the Thinkers plan to find ways to gain access to and control of Martian minds. As Maizie begins answering questions, one of them sparks curiosity, asking whether Maizie is short for Maelzel. The machine responds with \"no\" as the officials are perplexed by the question, which references a character in a story by Edgar Allen Poe in which a machine was found to be fake and operated by a man. Apparently, the question came from a member of Opperly's group, a team of physicists; Jorj advises that the issue be looked into. Later, scientists Opperly and Farquar discuss the previous events. Opperly says that he covered for Farquar, who submitted the question, but still disagrees with his decision to dig at the Thinkers. Farquar believes that the Thinkers, along with Maizie, are fakes and ought to be exposed. Farquar and Opperly go back and forth, debating whether or not exposing the Thinkers is worth violence or energy, when Farquar receives a message from Jorj regarding the meeting about his space project. Opperly is skeptical of Jorj's motives, but Farquar plans to go anyway. On his way home, Jorj ponders the future of the Thinkers with excitement, eagerly awaiting a future where they would be on the same level of the Scientists, and where they would build the true Maizie."}
{"id": "51152_1", "pid": "51152_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31456, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In an alternate history of America, wherein World War III has occurred, Jorj Helmuth wakes up and turns off the device which enables him to learn in his sleep. Jorj is a forty year old Thinker, a class of individuals who work with the US government on various projects, such as monthly rockets to Mars and a super-intelligent computer Maizie. As Jorj prepares for his day, he receives a call from the President, who is waiting to see Maizie. \nMaizie, a large computer with large panels, controls, indicators, and terminals occupies a two-story room in the Thinkers\u2019 Foundation, in which the President and members of his cabinet are waiting. It is described as many times more intelligent than humans, and was built by the Thinkers despite the skepticism of cyberneticists and scientists. The president, his secretary, two generals, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Space regard Maizie with reverence, speaking in hushed tones for fear that it could overhear them despite the knowledge that it only receives input from the ticker tape fed to it. Jorj enters onto the tape questions from the officials, before noticing an errant question, which he learns is from Morton Opperly\u2019s group of physicists. He feeds the tape to Maizie, which begins to emit a noise indicative of the start of its processes.\nAs they await Maizie\u2019s answers, Jorj directs their attention to a television screen broadcasting the launch of a rocket to Mars. We learn that Martians have imparted profound wisdom through the Thinkers to the world, which still suffers from the effects of the third world war. In response to the President\u2019s wish that Martians be brought to Earth to directly share their mental science, Jorj reminds him that only the Thinkers\u2019 minds can safely interact with the Martians\u2019. \nThe narrator reveals that inside Maizie is, rather than complicated machinery etching the edges of molecules to store information, a man who manually answers the input questions. He pauses when he reaches the question from Opperly\u2019s group, which asks if Maizie stands for Maelzel. He types out a response in the negative and continues. It is also revealed that the rocket launched for Mars only travels acutely beyond the ionosphere, rather than to its advertised destination. The astronaut, who is accompanied by his cat, reads about the knowledge which he would pass off as Martian wisdom upon his descent to Earth. \nMaizie has returned the output tape, and the Secretary of Space wonders aloud who Maelzel is. One of the generals recalls that it is from a story about a chess automaton inside which was actually a man. They dismiss Opperly\u2019s group as confused. \nIn Opperly\u2019s residence however, Opperly and Willard Farquar discuss the Thinkers\u2019 deception. Though Farquar aims to reveal the sham, Opperly is unsure he will succeed, citing that people want to be told what they wish were true. Farquhar receives an invitation from Jorj, which they surmise is because of a demand for rockets in the near future.\n"}
{"id": "51152_1", "pid": "51152_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31456, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set after World War III. Jorj is a Thinker that occasionally uses hypnotic control on a girl named Caddy to make her agreeable with him. The Thinkers have made big claims that they have achieved great technological feats. They claim that they have created a cubic brain-machine that is intelligent and knows everything. They say the machine event helped finished building itself. They also have claimed that they have nuclear powered Mars rockets. This too is not true. They send a person to space pretending that the person is headed towards Mars, when in reality that person will be circling the Earth for two months. Not everyone knows of the lies, the President and secretary of state do not. \n\nDuring a review of the tapes for Maizie, the group comes across an unusual question asking about Maizie. Jorj finds out that the question was written by Opperly\u2019s group. Opperly and Farquar are two scientists that know of the Thinkers deception. Farquar is the one who wrote the question, to Opperly\u2019s dismay. Caddy was previously with Farquar, before she went with Jorj. \n\nOpperly and Farquar disagree over how they should respond to the Thinker\u2019s deceptions. Farquar wants to act with violence to continue to try to expose them. Opperly reasons that they tried to expose the Thinkers before and nothing happened, so they should cut their losses. Farquar suggests that the Thinkers are vulnerable because their technology does not exist and it would be easy to attack them. Opperly is concerned that the Thinkers may be able to buy Farquar off if they offer Caddy back to him. \n\nAt the end of the story, Jorj has plans to make sure the Thinkers no longer have to use deception. He excitedly thinks of how the Thinkers can build the true Mars rocket and even perhaps the true Maizie and goes to sleep with these thoughts in his mind. \n"}
{"id": "51152_1", "pid": "51152_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31456, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After waking up, Jorj Helmuth, a Thinker, sends a message to Farquar and the other professionals so that he can get help in building a rocket. He states that he has funds from the government and wishes to work together. Importantly, the girl, who is sleeping next to Jorj, is controls hypnotically by Jorj, and she is somehow connected to Farquar. \n\nThe president then shows up waiting to see Maizie. Standing before the two stories high electrical brain, he feels like he is seeing the actual God. Not only does he feels so, the generals wonders if this is the Second Coming, the Secretary of State feels the power and respect in wisdom that this machine has, the Secretary of Space is relieved that the Thinks are the ones who built it rather than the professional physicists who does not get things done but simply tell you how things should be done. While surprised at the question that the Opperly\u2019s group asked, Jorj simply entered all the questions for Maizie to solve on the tape. Then he suggests that the government officials should watch the takeoff of the rocket that is going to Mars. While the Secretary of Space is somewhat angry at Jorj for not even informing him about the spaceship, he tells himself that the Thinkers had rescued him from breakdowns and will be bringing mental discoveries from Mars. \n\nAs Maizie continues to work, the readers learn that there is actually a person that work on the questions as they enter into Maizie. He reads the questions and write down their answers. Interestingly, he also notices the question from the Opperly\u2019s group. It makes him somewhat angry. After the rocket goes into space, Jorj gives the answers that are produced by Maizie to each government official. Then we learn that the Opperly\u2019s group is asking about Maelzel. Maelzel was a chess playing machine that was proven to have a man hidden inside it. Later we learned that the Opperly\u2019s group knows that Maizie also has a man hidden in it, and they wanted to tease them. Which is why they wrote the question. Apparently they succeeded, since the question got Jorj angry.\n\nWe then see two physicists, namely Opperly and Farquar, arguing over whether the world needs a magician or a physicist right now when the invitation that Jorj previously sent arrives. Opperly is suspicious of the invitation and what they will do to Farquar, mentioning the girl that ran off with a Thinker. Indeed, Jorj is not only thinking of building a Mars rocket, he also want to have other things built such as Maizie, so that the Thinkers will be farther ahead from with the scientists. But Farquar does not think so."}
{"id": "51152_2", "pid": "51152_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Maizie work, and how is this significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Maizie is a large contraption that occupies a room in the Thinker's Foundation. It consists of various controls, cables, and synapses, more than the human brain. It reads questions through information fed on a tape. Once Maizie processes the questions and conjures up answers, it delivers information back through a man who translates the tape into an answer. The main point regarding Maizie is that little to no one knows how it truly works, which is why it is regarded even by the President as a superior guide for intelligence. Maizie appears to be intimidating with its incomprehensible parts and gadgets, but the process in which it delivers simple answers to questions allows the public to trust it with decisions."}
{"id": "51152_2", "pid": "51152_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Maizie work, and how is this significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Maizie, which is regarded as a super-intelligent computer capable of answering complex problems about governance and political strategy, is in fact merely a unit housing a man who manually answers the questions posed to the machine. Jorj Helmuth, a member of a group called the Thinkers, inputs questions onto tape which are fed to Maizie, and the tape rolls along inside the machine and emerges in the room containing the man. He tapes out answers, which are output and given by Jorj to those who asked the question. \nThis deception is a common strategy of the Thinkers, who have also faked travel to Mars, among other inventions. However, they hope to one day be able to construct all those things in order to stand on equal footing as scientists.\nMaizie is a means by which the Thinkers have influenced politics, and through which they have acquired power. It is hypothesized by Opperly, an elderly physicist, who knows how Maizie works, that the success of the deception is a result of their era, which yearns for fantastical solutions. The decision to reveal Maizie to the world is a topic of conversation between Opperly and a younger member of his group, Willard Farquar, who wants to expose the machine. \n"}
{"id": "51152_2", "pid": "51152_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Maizie work, and how is this significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Maizie is a brain machine built by the Thinkers. The Thinkers publicly claim that is a million times more synapses than a human brain. They say that Maizie has incredible intelligent capabilities. The reason Maizie is significant to the story is that Opperly and Farquar reveal how Maizie is actually fake. Someone records the answers for Maizie to recite. The Thinkers came into power because they were able to present incredible feats of technology like Maizie, but the technology turns out to not actually exist. Jorj Helmuth claims to be the mind that is behind the \u2018mind\u2019 of Maizie. "}
{"id": "51152_2", "pid": "51152_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Maizie work, and how is this significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Maizie is supposed to be the thinking machine that has a million times more synapses than human brains have. It should take in the questions by humans entering it on the tape, and report answers back. Maizie was set up to work for the humans or the right-minded leaders of humans. However, Maizie does not work the way that the government believes it does, or the way that the Thinkers want them to believe. Instead, there is literally a fat man sitting in the middle of the room, he looks through the tapes that are sent in to his room and then writes down the answers to each of those questions. To the government officials, this is magical and believable, and they take advises from the machine. However, apparently the physicists knew the actual way that Maizie works, they do not want to be fooled and teased the Thinkers by sending them a question. On the question, it asks if Maizie stands for Maelzel. Maelzel is a chess playing machine that turned out to have a man inside it, exactly the same with Maizie. While the government officials did not seem to understand the mockery in it, the Thinkers did."}
{"id": "51152_3", "pid": "51152_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the Thinkers and how are they significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Thinkers are magicians who dominate the current society. When America was in crisis post-World War III, they provided solutions to problems and questions, and acted as a more structured, moral, \"human\" group for leadership than physicists prior. The Thinkers are the creators of Maizie, a brain-like computer that answers any question; Maizie is used by many in government to make drastic decisions with the goal of preserving humanity. The Thinkers are also working towards a larger plan of moving their work to Mars, ultimately dominating Martians the same way they dominated Earth. There is also controversy surrounding the Thinkers, mainly from the Physicists, who believe that their work relies on the desperation of society and is fraudulent."}
{"id": "51152_3", "pid": "51152_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the Thinkers and how are they significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Thinkers are a group of individuals led by Jorj Helmuth. Their members include Helmuth, a man who is an intermediary between government officials and the Thinkers\u2019 super-intelligent machine Maizie, Tregarron, the man inside Maizie who produces its responses, and an unnamed astronaut who the world thinks travels to Mars and returns with Martian wisdom, when in fact he merely floats in the upper atmosphere. \nThe Thinkers have deceived government officials, including the President of the United States and his cabinet, with the use of Maizie, a machine which is advertised as being able to solve complex problems of every type. In fact, Maizie is operated by a man who writes its responses. The story revolves around an interaction between the President, his cabinet and Maizie; a discussion is also had between two physicists, Farquar and Opperly, who are aware of the Thinkers\u2019 deception but are in disagreement with one another about whether their information should be more thoroughly shared. \n"}
{"id": "51152_3", "pid": "51152_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the Thinkers and how are they significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Thinkers are a group of people that won a Presidential election. Farquar exclaims that their power was not earned because of their technology but because the world is not at peace. The Thinkers are significant to the story because they make many claims about their technologies and innovations. They claim they built a cube called Maizie which is a brain machine. In addition, they have told people that they built Mars rockets with nuclear motors designed by Maizie. Neither of the two inventions are true, but rather they are deceptions. Farquar calls them Charlatans for the magician-like trickery they practice. "}
{"id": "51152_3", "pid": "51152_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWho are the Thinkers and how are they significant to the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Thinkers are a group of charlatans that tells people what they wish to hear. But because of the times that they are in, people chooses to believe in magic. As Opperly mentions, when the time is good, people don\u2019t need magicians. But when the time is bad, people would do anything just to get the magic cures. As Farquar sees, the Thinkers are simply lucky and are talented with their stage-managing skills. They uses the brain-machine to justify their guesses. The Thinkers have faked Maizie as well as rocket landing on Mars in order to have control over the government. All government officials would do exactly as what the Thinkers order them to do. However, the physicists knew what the Thinkers are doing, they know that their rocket did not go to Mars, Maizie is not a human-brain machine, and the mental science of the Martians is fake. But since they got the government\u2019s support, Jorj sends an invitation to the physicists to support Jorj and the other Thinkers in building those actual machineries. Farquar thinks he should go while Opperly suggests it might be a trap. "}
{"id": "51152_4", "pid": "51152_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Farquar have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31469, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Farquar sparks the driving conflict of the story; the question he submits threatens the authority and legitimacy of the Thinkers, implying that the machine that guides society's decisions is a fake. This question disturbs the officials present at Maizie's event. Farquar also attempts to convince Opperly, a major Scientist, that the Thinkers should be exposed and called out for their deception. He is eager to take action against them. Farquar plays an additional role in the story as someone who Jorj must turn to for help; he is a skilled physician that the Thinkers need in order to develop their idea for a nuclear rocket. Farquar determines the fate of Jorj and the Thinkers as someone who both poses a threat to them and is needed by them."}
{"id": "51152_4", "pid": "51152_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Farquar have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31469, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Willard Farquar is a physicist who is a member of Morton Opperly\u2019s group. He is a large individual with strong and ugly features. He has traced the path of the Thinker\u2019s spaceship and found that, contrary to the Thinkers\u2019 claims, the spaceships do not travel to Mars. Through Opperly, Farquar submits a revealing question to the Thinkers\u2019 machine Maizie, antagonizing the Thinkers. \nIn Opperly\u2019s residence, Farquar proposes further chipping away at their deception, saying that they shouldn\u2019t avoid a task merely because of its difficulty. Opperly, who is from the previous generation of academic physicists, disagrees. Farquar condemns his generation, saying that they wasted the power of atomic energy which they could have used to influence humanity. As he is saying that the Thinkers will soon need the help of scientists to support their bluffing, an invitation from the leader of the Thinkers arrives, inviting Farquar to the Thinkers\u2019 Foundation. We learn that one of Farquar\u2019s previous love interests had left him for a Thinker. \n"}
{"id": "51152_4", "pid": "51152_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Farquar have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31469, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Farquar creates a question for an examination that hints to the Secretary of State and Jorj that he knows the secret that they are hiding. He knows that Maizie is not the intelligent and amazing piece of machinery that they claim. He knows that there is a person behind Maizie that is helping to create the illusion that Maizie is an intelligent cubic piece of machinery. Farquar wants to fight in an act of violence against the Thinkers because of their deceit towards the population. He is upset that they lie about Maizie\u2019s capabilities, their Mars rockets, and their Martian mental science.  "}
{"id": "51152_4", "pid": "51152_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Farquar have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31469, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Farquar is a physicist who knows that the Thinkers do not have a real Maizie. He has sent the question about whether Maizie is a Maelzel to the Thinkers, teasing them. Farquar\u2019s argument with Opperly allow us to learn about the Thinkers and the physicists. The Thinkers have the government\u2019s control because they seems to be able to do things that the physicists are not able to, such as going to Mars, learning about their mental sciences, as well building a human-brain machine. However, we learn from Farquar that none of that is true. There is no landing on Mars, designing a human-brain machine, which is why they need the physicists help. \n\nJorj indeed decide to send an invitation to the physicists after seeing the girl that he hypnotically controls, thus the girl should be the reason that the invitation is sent to Farquar. Later we learn from Opperly that there was a girl named Miss Arkady who had been with Farquar. She could be the Caddy that Jorj mentioned. Miss Arkady apparently went off with a Thinker, and Opperly thinks that this could be the reason that they are sending this invitation to them. However, Farquar does not believe it."}
{"id": "51152_5", "pid": "51152_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are Opperly and Farquar alike and different?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31474, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Opperly and Farquar are both physicists. They both have the same role in society as possessing knowledge and abilities to create technology and machinery. However, despite their similar titles, they are drastically different, both in appearance and character. Opperly is an elderly man, who looks timid and meek, though wise, next to the young, large, and impulsive Farquar. Opperly acts as a rational voice, discouraging Farquar from his rebellious and violent nature, specifically towards the Thinkers. Opperly, having lived through history, is hesitant to threaten the authority of the Thinkers and instead understands that society is in need of them. He believes that scientists should not have a place in taking action and being violent, and instead should allow the Thinkers to uphold the nation. Farquar, on the other hand, is a man of action who believes the Thinkers are immoral and inauthentic. He contrasts Opperly's reasonable nature with passion and free thinking."}
{"id": "51152_5", "pid": "51152_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are Opperly and Farquar alike and different?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31474, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Morton Opperly and Willard Farquar are both physicists, though they hail from different generations. They share in the knowledge that the Thinkers\u2019 have deceived members at the highest level of government and have exposed them, to little success. Opperly, an older physicist from the age of academic scientists, is reserved and skeptical about future attempts to do the same. Farquar, however, is youthful and frustrated about their situation. Whereas Opperly is unable to imagine scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer using violence to achieve their ends, Farquar condemns them for wasting their opportunities to shape the future with their knowledge of atomic power. "}
{"id": "51152_5", "pid": "51152_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are Opperly and Farquar alike and different?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31474, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Morton Opperly is an elderly physicist. William Farquar is much younger and he too is a scientist. Opperly\u2019s positions reflected his elderly age with his living room having books, pen and ink, and a Picasso painting. Farquar wants to continue to poke at the Thinkers to expose them for their lies. Opperly does not agree with this strategy because he does not know what is best for the planet. While he does not agree with Farquar\u2019s desire to act upon their knowledge of the Thinkers\u2019 lies, he does call them animals. Farquar responds by saying that he feels like an animal because he feels trapped in a cage. Opperly believes it is not worth fighting with the Thinkers, but Farquar wants the fight and he wants violence. "}
{"id": "51152_5", "pid": "51152_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAppointment in Tomorrow\n \n \n BY FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\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\n Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\n \n \n \n The first angry rays of the sun\u2014which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals\u2014pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.\n \n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n \n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please, lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n \n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n \n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\n \n \n\n \n Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.\n \n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing\u2014the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.\n \n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life\u2014and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.\n \n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\" While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:\n \n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n \n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.\n \n \n Jorj Helmuth\n \n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.\n \n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n \n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n \n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes.\"\n \n \n\n \n Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.\n \n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls\u2014the permissible ones\u2014and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n \n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\n  This was the machine that really thought\u2014a million-plus!\n \n \n This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n \n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\n \n \n\n \n The grizzled general\u2014there was also one who was gray\u2014was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\" rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders\u2014even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n \n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?\n \n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.\n \n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better\u2014more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\n \n \n\n \n The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n \n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds\u2014profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n \n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.\n \n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question Four\u2014whom would that come from?\"\n \n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?\"\n \n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n \n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.\n \n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there\u2014just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship\u2014and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n \n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n \n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n \n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n\"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj.\"\n \n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\n \n \n\n \n Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n \n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.\n \n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.\n \n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.\n \n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n \n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n \n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n \n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n \n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\n \n \n\n \n Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n \n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.\n \n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip\u2014priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.\n \n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.\n \n \n\n \n Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.\n \n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n \n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n \n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool question like that?\"\n \n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.\n \n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar.\"\n \n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd investigate.\"\n \n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.\n \n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender\u2014fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.\n \n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n \n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.\"\n \n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n \n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be done until it takes.\"\n \n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware.\"\n \n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\n \n \n\n \n Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good\u2014that is, when the truth offers no threat\u2014people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n\"Well, we all know what happened to\u2014\" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.\n \n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true\u2014that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.\"\n \n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?\"\n \n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n \n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n \n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n\"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power\u2014only established facts or lies are.\"\n \n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you.\"\n \n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n \n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n \n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?\"\n \n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n \n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n \n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n \n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet\u2014and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed\u2014and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n \n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got\u2014peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n \n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n \n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n \n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n \n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n \n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n \n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help.\"\n \n \"An invitation?\"\n \n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap\u2014that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n \n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you.\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\n \n \n\n \n Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n \n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n \n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n \n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this invitation?\"\n \n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n \n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.\"\n \n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n \n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?\"\n \n \"Not exactly.\"\n \n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded angrily.\n \n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change your aims.\"\n \n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.\n \n \n\n \n As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n \n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.\n \n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust\u2014processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.\n \n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n \n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.\n \n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive\u2014and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n \n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even\u2014his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward\u2014build the true Maizie!\n \n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n \n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\n \n \n\n \n Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word\u2014a pet form of her name\u2014that would send her into obedient trance.\n \n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n \n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.\n \n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n \n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are Opperly and Farquar alike and different?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31414, "query_start_index": 31416, "query_end_index": 31474, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Opperly believes that the world needs magicians right now, not them, the physicists. In the bad times, people would go desperately looking for the magic cure, while in the good times the magicians are laughed at and physicists respected. He understands that the power of the Thinkers lies in what they do not have at the moment, which is peace, honor, good conscience, etc. Farquar on the other hand thinks that they need to perform action. Thus after overruling Opperly, Farquar and other physicists decided to send teasing questions for Maizie to answer. This question indeed got Jorj, the Thinker, unhappy, and he tells the Secretary of Space to investigate it. \n\nFarquar predicts that the Thinkers will need their help in building all those machineries that they faked. Indeed, the invitation gets to them, and it is sent by Jorj stating that they should work together, and mentioning that the Thinkers have quite a lot of government funds. While Opperly thinks that the Thinkers did not simply send the invitation asking for their help, Farquar believes that he will not be persuaded to change his mind at all. \u2003"}
{"id": "48513_1", "pid": "48513_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Daniel Oak going into Ravenhurst\u2019s office to talk with him about another job. Ravenhurst tells Daniel that there is an issue with the robot McGuire because the robot will only listen to Daniel\u2019s commands. This happened because of the way the robot was programmed and Daniel happened to trigger the programming that attaches the robot to whoever the first person was to speak to it. \n\nRavenhurst does not like Daniel\u2019s methods but hires him anyways to fix the situation. Daniel believes that he is hired because Ravenhurst is afraid of losing his manager position. Ravenhurst hires and sends Daniel to the planet Ceres to work with the roboticists at Viking. Daniel puts on his vacuum suit and boards a flitterboat to Ceres. The reader learns that Daniel is a double agent as he actually works for the UN government\u2019s Secret Service agency, also known as the Political Survey Division.\n\nDaniel is sent to Ceres to help with the robot McGuire. When he arrives at Ceres he is met by Colonel Harrington Brock. He goes to have a drink with Colonel Brock and they create a separate plan from Ravenhurst and team up to implement their own solution to the McGuire problem. \n"}
{"id": "48513_1", "pid": "48513_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel Oak enters the office of Shalimar Ravenhurst, the manager of the Viking Spacecraft company whom he describes as an intelligent but unlikeable man, on the planetoid Raven\u2019s Rest. Ravenhurst offers Daniel a glass of wine, and reminds him that he has caused him trouble in the past. He reminds Daniel that the MGYR-7, an advanced robot spaceship operating system capable of understanding and speaking English nicknamed the McGuire, considers only Daniel as its master, rendering it uncooperative. Because of the McGuire self-preservation directive, it doesn\u2019t allow this obedience to be erased. The most efficient path forward, Ravenhurt concludes, is to build the eighth iteration of MGYR, and he hires Daniel to expedite the process. \nDaniel leaves Raven\u2019s Rest and travels in his flitterboat to the planetoid Ceres, a large asteroid with weak a gravitational force conducive to manufacturing mainly owned by Viking, and from which it operates. Daniel is an expediter, a job which involves speeding up projects for companies who hire him. We also learn that Daniel is a member of the Political Survey Division of the UN Government, which is interested in the McGuire project. However, it is not because of its sophistication and complexity, which is similar to that of a traffic pattern control robot, that Daniel has been tasked with gathering information about the McGuire, but rather its language-processing abilities.\nDaniel describes Asimov\u2019s three laws of the robotic brain, which in summary direct the machine to obey human beings. However, because of the difficulty in defining a human being, the first six iterations of the McGuire have failed when conflicting directions are given. Only in the seventh iteration, when the McGuire is directed to regard only the person to first give it instructions as its commander, does the machine achieve any success. \nLanding on Ceres, Daniel is greeted by Colonel Harrington Brock, the head of Ravenhurst\u2019s Security Guard who is dressed in a black-and-gold skin tight suit. Brock invites Daniel for a drink, which he accepts. Brock tells Daniel, who feigns ignorance about the subject, about two competing companies, Thurston and Baedecker Metals & Mining, who aim to sabotage Viking in order to assume control of Ceres. Despite having been asked by Ravenhurst, who disapproves of Daniel\u2019s methods, not to involve Daniel on the project, Brock asks for Daniel\u2019s help on this matter of corporate espionage. Though he refuses being employed by Brock, citing conflicts of interest, he agrees to enter into a cooperative relationship and to help out. \n"}
{"id": "48513_1", "pid": "48513_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel Oak, a \"Confidential Expediter\" and agent of the Political Survey Division, is called into the office of Shalimar Ravenhurst, owner of Viking Spacecraft. Work is being done to create a new version of a complex robot, called McGuire, who has been sabotaged in its past six attempts. Daniel has been hired to get down to the issue and prevent further sabotage to the seventh model. Upon entering Ravenhurst's office, Daniel is reprimanded as he is told he caused the sabotage of McGuire. McGuire operates to avoid issues by only following the orders of one individual, that person being the first to speak to him; this person ended up being Daniel. Because of this, Ravenhurst tells Daniel that he must go to Ceres, where McGuire is being built, and aid Viking in building a new model. Daniel heads to Ceres in his flitterboat, where he meets Colonel Brock. Brock tells Daniel that a competing business, Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, is trying to drive Viking out of business and overtake Ceres and its resources by causing issues and potential sabotages. However, Brock and Daniel are both aware that it was Ravenhurst's daughter, Jack, that has been causing sabotage, which is kept under wraps. Brock then attempts to hire Daniel to help him with the situation, to which Daniel denies, saying that he cannot conflict with Ravenhurst's contract. Daniel then proposes that they instead work alongside each other, and help each other through services and tasks rather than money, and Brock agrees."}
{"id": "48513_1", "pid": "48513_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with Daniel Oak, a double agent, in Shalimar Raverhurst\u2019s office, and it was the third time that he is on this mountain-sized planetoid. Raverhurst first poured Oak a glass of Madeira. Then he told Oak that he has caused quite a lot of trouble for him. We learn that there is a robot, called McGuire, that has been sabotaged by Oak while he is hired to prevent those kind of things. Because it is kind of difficult to define human being for the robots, thus McGuire is implemented to follow the order of the first person that it speaks to after activation; and apparently, that person is Oak. Then we learn that Oak is a double agent, and he pretends to not know much about this issue at all. So Raverhurst goes on telling Oak why they cannot undo this sabotage: it\u2019s costly thus not worthwhile, and McGuire does not allow others to change his processes. \n\nThen Raverhurst tells Oak that he will be going to Ceres to help build MGYR-8. So then Oak goes into his flitterboat and is going to Ceres. Then we learn from Oak that McGuire is different from other robots such as a traffic robot. Firstly McGuire is mobile in the sense that he is the spacecraft. His spaceship travels very quickly and there is no set paths for the robot to choose from, there is the whole universe. Moreover, he has to deal with unforeseen emergencies as well as with humans. Thus McGuire needs to be able to understand English and can communicate with humans. The most difficult part is defining \u201chuman being,\u201d thus McGuire is set to takes order from one individual. \n\nAfter Oak arrives in Ceres, Colonel Harrington Brock, who is the security guard of Ravenhurst, was waiting for him. Instead of going back for a bath and sleep, Brock asks him to have a drink together. At O\u2019Banion\u2019s Bar Brock asks for Oak\u2019s help, while Oak refuses to help, he suggests that they work together in co-operation."}
{"id": "48513_2", "pid": "48513_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Daniel Oak\u2019s job?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28947, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel Oak states that he has an office in New York and describes himself as a Confidential Expediter. He has worked with Ravenhurst before and the story begins with an understanding that Daniel recently completed a job for Ravenhurst. He later mentions that he is a double agent. Daniel works for the Political Survey Division branch of the System Census Bureau for the UN government. Unbeknownst to most of the System\u2019s citizens, the Political Survey Division is the Secret Service arm of the UN government. \n\nA flitterboat is a more economical option than a full spaceship. It is described as having a single gravitoinertial engine. It is meant to have the most basic necessities that are needed for a person to survive their journey, which includes oxygen, water, and the requirement of food necessary. The flitterboat is not necessarily more affordable, but it does provide the purpose of transporting from one Belt to another Belt. Daniel Oak details how a vacuum suit is needed to be worn in a flitterboat.\n"}
{"id": "48513_2", "pid": "48513_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Daniel Oak\u2019s job?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28947, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel is, officially, a confidential expediter. In this role, he helps to ensure the rapid completion of projects to which his employers have assigned him. Typically, his job involves finding other people who are able to fulfil the request initially assigned to him, and collecting his fee. \nIn the case of the McGuire project, which involves the construction of a sophisticated spaceship operating system capable of understanding and speaking English, Daniel is also operating in his capacity as an agent of the Political survey Division. The PSD is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN government, and is often thought to be responsible for surveying the state of political systems throughout the System. However, in reality the PSD more closely resembles a secret service of the UN. \n"}
{"id": "48513_2", "pid": "48513_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Daniel Oak\u2019s job?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28947, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel Oak's official job title is a Confidential Expediter. His job consists of helping others complete tasks, usually hiring a third party and collecting a fee. Daniel Oak is also an agent of the Political Survey Division, a Secret Service organization. In the story, Daniel Oak has been hired by Ravenhurst directly in order to ensure that his company, Viking Spacecraft, succeeds in business with the development of the new McGuire model. He is hired specifically to prevent sabotage to McGuire, as sabotage would lead to the downfall of the Viking business."}
{"id": "48513_2", "pid": "48513_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Daniel Oak\u2019s job?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28947, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel Oak is a confidential expediter who helps people to get their things done. So normally he would find someone who is an expert in the area that his customers are looking for, then pair them and then collect the fees. Interestingly, now he is a double agent. He was working for Ravenhurst where he had to prevent sabotage. However, during that job, he was not successful since he did sabotage their robot, McGuire. Because he is the first one that the robot spoke to after it is activated, thus McGuire only listens to the order given by him. Moreover, since costly thus not worthwhile , and McGuire\u2019s build in program does not allow tampering. \n\nCurrently, Ravenhurst is telling Oak to go to Ceres to help with the roboticists build MGYR-8. Because Raverhurst wants it to be not only fast and safe, but also wants it to become something that can be used commercially. And later, when he arrives in Ceres, Brock asks him for help. While he didn\u2019t agree to do so, he did suggest they work together, since they are all working for Ravenhurst, there should not be a conflict of interest. "}
{"id": "48513_3", "pid": "48513_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Ravenhurst and Daniel Oak?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28981, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ravenhurst and Oak do not have a friendly relationship with each other. Occasionally, Ravenhurst occasionally hires Daniel to complete certain jobs for him. Ravenhurst is a high executive at a company that makes robots. He has recently hired Daniel to fix a problem with a robot and has to rehire him to fix a problem that Daniel caused on the previous job. \n\nDaniel is not loyal to Ravenhurst because he has acknowledged that he is a double agent working for the UN government and not just Ravenhurst. In addition, Daniel decides to team up with Colonel Harrington Brock to tackle the problem at hand. The Colonel says that he is doing it in Ravenhurst\u2019s best interests. \n"}
{"id": "48513_3", "pid": "48513_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Ravenhurst and Daniel Oak?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28981, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Daniel Oak has previously been hired by Shalimar Ravenhurst, presumably to expedite the completion of the seventh iteration of the McGuire, the MGYR-7, and to resolve the sabotage of the earlier models caused by Ravenhurst\u2019s daughter. Though Daniel regards Ravenhurst as an intelligent man, one at the top of the managerial field, he finds Ravenhurst utterly unlikeable. \n\tIn their interaction on Raven\u2019s Rest, the asteroid occupied by Ravenhurst\u2019s office, Ravenhurst describes his reluctance to hire Daniel to assist in the completion of the MGYR-8 because of his part in making the development of the eighth model necessary. However, Ravenhurst nonetheless acknowledges Daniel\u2019s skill at his job, and hires him. \n"}
{"id": "48513_3", "pid": "48513_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Ravenhurst and Daniel Oak?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28981, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ravenhurst is Daniel Oak's employer. Daniel admires Ravenhurst professionally; he sees him as smart, savvy, and practical. However, he believes that Ravenhurst is unpleasant on an interpersonal level. When meeting Ravenhurst in his office, Daniel knows he is being reprimanded and is in an inferior position professionally. Despite this, Daniel's wit gives in and the two have a conversation with snarky remarks and sarcastic comments. Though there is a power dynamic between Ravenhurst and Daniel, Daniel is determined to appear on the same level as Ravenhurst, and throughout conversations with him tries to be one step ahead of his thought process, which irritates Ravenhurst."}
{"id": "48513_3", "pid": "48513_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Ravenhurst and Daniel Oak?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28981, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ravenhurst hired Daniel Oak to make sure that the robots will not be sabotaged. However, we learn in the beginning of the story that he accidentally sabotaged the robot, McGuire. Ravenhurst tells Oak that because of what he did, now Ravenhurst\u2019s own position is threatened. Oak was hired because Ravenhurst has spent too much money on the McGuire project where things became shaky at Viking, their company. Oak was supposed to fix it, but instead his chance of losing his position as a manger seems to have increased. Then Ravenhurst tells Oak that the MGYR-7 was built with a different meaning on the term \u201chuman being\u201d than before. Whoever what the first person that speaks to the robot after activation, that person becomes the only individual that the robot takes order from. And apparently McGuire\u2019s first order came from Oak. So now he is the only individual that can order McGuire. Ravenhurst also tells Oak that they simply cannot change McGuire\u2019s memory. So later, Ravenhurst asks Oak to go to Ceres to help them with building MGYR-8. And after arriving, the readers see that Brock and Oak decide to work with each other. "}
{"id": "48513_4", "pid": "48513_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe a flitterboat and when it is used.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28965, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A flitterboat is a more economical option than a full spaceship. It is described as having a single gravitoinertial engine. It is meant to have the most basic necessities that are needed for a person to survive their journey, which includes oxygen, water, and the requirement of food necessary. The flitterboat is not necessarily more affordable, but it does provide the purpose of transporting from one Belt to another Belt. Daniel Oak details how a vacuum suit is needed to be worn in a flitterboat. Daniel describes the flitterboat as a tool that does its job, but is not comfortable. "}
{"id": "48513_4", "pid": "48513_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe a flitterboat and when it is used.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28965, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A flitterboat is a small, single-person space vehicle capable of navigating from beacon to beacon in the Belt, an area of space in which it is impractical to use full-sized spaceships. It is propelled by a single engine, and contains only a few things necessary for life - water, air, and small amounts of food. \n\tIn order to ride in a flitterboat, the passenger must wear an uncomfortable vac suit and sit straddling a drive tube. The main body of the vessel is composed of a material called transite, which is nearly transparent. The gravitational force inside a flitterboat is one gee. \n"}
{"id": "48513_4", "pid": "48513_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe a flitterboat and when it is used.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28965, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A flitterboat is a smaller spaceship used for individual transportation on the Belt; to use a full sized spaceship would be inconvenient and impractical, so the flitterboat is used for local travel for one. It has a singular engine and can carry air, and a bit of food and water. It contains an anchor that holds the boat to the ground. Because it is only meant for short travels, one can only last a short amount of time in one, so flitterboats are used to get to and from different beacon points in the neighborhood."}
{"id": "48513_4", "pid": "48513_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe a flitterboat and when it is used.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 28965, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The flitterboat has a single gravitoinertial engine and it contains a few necessities of life, air, water and little food. But this flitterboat still costs quite a lot. The flitterboat is used for short distance travelling since it is very hard to stay in a vacuum suit for too long. Thus it is common to hop from beacon to beacon, and this decreases the average speed since most of the time one would spend accelerating and decelerating. The flitterboat has a bucket seat for the driver and it produces a one-gee pull. It sits on the drive tube in a way similar to a witch on a broomstick. Importantly, a flitterboat cannot be stopped whenever it wants to, instead it has to get to a beacon station. Oak uses it when he was told by Raverhurst to travel to Ceres, he wears a vacuum suit when he was going to ride it. First he allowed the boat to get to the top of the planetoid by releasing the magnetic anchor and once the station is reached, the flitterboat has to be parked at the specific space assigned by the Landing Control."}
{"id": "48513_5", "pid": "48513_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the current McGuire version different from the previous versions and why is that important?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 29020, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The most recent McGuire is the seventh edition. It is described as being more mobile as it is a spacecraft. It is potentially dangerous because it can move at thousands of miles per second. The most recent version is different from the previous six because it follows Asimov\u2019s famous Three Laws of Robotics more closely than the other versions. The laws emphasize that a robot should define a human being and making sure the robot does not hurt a human. That has previously proven difficult. McGuire version 7 circumnavigated the issue by defining whatever first awoken the robot as a human and its controller."}
{"id": "48513_5", "pid": "48513_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the current McGuire version different from the previous versions and why is that important?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 29020, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The present iteration of the McGuire, the MGYR-7, is different in its interpretation of Asimov\u2019s three laws of robotics. These three laws, as they are told to the reader by Daniel, are the following: firstly, a robot cannot harm a human being; secondly, a robot must obey orders from human, expect when in conflict with the first law, and thirdly, a robot shall be self-preserving, except when in conflict with the first and third laws. In the first six models of the McGuire, the engineers encoded Asimov\u2019s laws into the machine\u2019s directives. However, this led to erratic and insane-like behaviour from the robot when conflicting commands were issued. \n\tThe seventh iteration, however, resolves this issue by instead restricting the individuals from whom the McGuire takes orders to only that person who issues the first order. The roboticists responsible for designing the McGuire, however, have noticed issues in the MGYR-7, which they aim to resolve in the eighth iteration, the construction of which Daniel has been hired to expedite. \n"}
{"id": "48513_5", "pid": "48513_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the current McGuire version different from the previous versions and why is that important?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 29020, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The previous models of McGuire struggled because of the difficulty to define what a \"human being\" is to robots. The Three Laws for robot construction state that robots must not allow harm to a human being, as well as obey orders from a human being. However, when receiving contradicting yet equally qualifying orders from two different human beings, the previous McGuire models would malfunction out of confusion. The seventh model, the current McGuire, narrowed down the definition of what a \"human being\" is, down to an individual. McGuire was constructed so that the individual he would obey would be the first individual that spoke to him when he was built. This is important because Daniel Oak, being the first human to interact with McGuire, is at the center of the robot's objectives."}
{"id": "48513_5", "pid": "48513_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL\n  \n \n HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT \u00b7 SCIENCE FICTION\n  \n \n\n Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge\u2014but no wisdom. He was smart\u2014but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher\u2014questions like \"Who are you?\"\n \n \n By RANDALL GARRETT\n \n\n \n I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.\n \n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n \n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n \n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n \n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.\n \n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n \n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n \n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n \n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n \n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping my voice level.\n \n [5]\n \n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.\n \n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n \n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win.\"\n \n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n \n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n \n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,\" I told him.\n \n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n \n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the point.\"\n \n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.\n \n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n \n \"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n \n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.\n \n \n\n \n My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n \n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n \n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.\"\n \n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n \n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n \n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n \n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n \n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again\u2014understandably enough, I think.\"\n \n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n \n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at me.\n \n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n \n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n \n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!\"\n  What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n \n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n \n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n \n \"I don't deny it.\"\n \n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n \n \"How much?\"\n \n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.\"\n \n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.\"\n \n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a deal. Is there anything else?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n \n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.\"\n \n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.\n \n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.\n \n \n\n \n Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.\n \n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life\u2014air, some water, and a very little food\u2014still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.\n \n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n \n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.\n \n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n \n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over the System.\n \n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n \n The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.\n \n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n \n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n \n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n \n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders\u2014 fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n \n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n \n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\n \n \n\n \n For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\n  First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.\n \n  Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .\n \n [15]\n  Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\n \n \n Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.\n \n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n \n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n \n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.\n \n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\" the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.\n \n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n \n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n \n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.\"\n \n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\" for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\n \n \n\n \n When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.\n \n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.\n \n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.\n \n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n \n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n \n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n \n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n \n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.\n \n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said, shaking his extended hand.\n \n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n \n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.\"\n \n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?\"\n \n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n \n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n \n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n \n [19]\n \n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.\n \n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.\n \n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n \n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\n \n \n\n \n Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n\"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n \n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.\n \n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n \n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.\n \n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell\u2014or sabotage\u2014around this planetoid just now!\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents.\"\n \n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n \n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n \n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.\"\n \n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n \n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n \n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n \n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n \n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n \n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n \n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you\u2014\"\n \n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.\n \n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.\n \n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n \n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n \n \" But ,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work with you.\"\n \n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n \n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.\n \n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n \n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud and clear. It's a deal.\"\n \n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n \n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.\"\n \n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the current McGuire version different from the previous versions and why is that important?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28910, "query_start_index": 28912, "query_end_index": 29020, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Firstly,  McGuire is different because he is mobile, in a way, he is the spaceship. Different from the traffic robot, he is in charge of one single object. But since the object is moving very fast through space where no specified pathway is determined, McGuire has to be able to react fast. Moreover, McGuire needs to understand English in order to communicate with human beings. \n\nMost importantly, the current version of the robot, McGuire, has alteration in the definition of \u201chuman being,\u201d instead of trying to define what human being is as the previous versions did, there will be one person who McGuire takes orders from, since defining individuals are way easier. Previously, they tried to allow robots listen to any one identified as human being. However, this easily made the robots go insane. Once two people \u2013 human beings \u2013 give an opposing order, the robot does not know what to do. The robot does not know who has a higher authority, thus not knowing which order to follow. Taking order from an individual will completely avoid such problems. "}
{"id": "63419_1", "pid": "63419_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25780, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with Starrett (Star) Blade\u2019s ship falling into one of the lakes on Alpha Centauri III. We then learns that Currently Star is trying to hunt Devil Garrett down, but his ship was hit by an energy-beam shot by Garrett, who is the top space pirate for years. After he fell, he hopes that Garrett himself will come here to look for him, but only one of Garrett\u2019s men appears and he is killed by Star. He also notices a person with another gun right after he murders that man. He almost kills this person as well, but is able to stop in time due to his strong reflex skills. The reason that he stopped is because she is a girl. She has beautiful dark colored hair and eyes. But she does not stop trying to capture him. Before he can explain himself, he is knocked out. \n\nWhen Star has finally waken up, he is already in a lab chair with Garrett is right in front of him. To his surprise, Garrett calls him Garrett, instead of Star. The girl clearly believes Garrett that Star is actually Garrett. However, again, before he can explain his situation to the girl, he is knocked out. Right after he wakes up, he learns that he will be executed. Then, he starts thinking of the girl again, but he does not really understand why he is thinking of her. Before he can do anything, he is taken from his cell. Standing 5 yards away from the gun that Garrett is holding, he tries to find a way that he could escape. He is glad to see that it is a two way transmitter, but loses his hope again when he realizes that it is an old-style transmitter. Then as the visual image started to form, Garrett is ready to perform the execution. Star cunningly kicks the metal fork onto the vision transmitter, which diverts Garrett\u2019s attention, and causes him to miss the shot. But because he is outnumbered by Garrett\u2019s men, he is caught and knocked out again. After he wake up, the girl finds him and tells him that she is capable of reading lips. Even though the visual images has no sound, she knows what the Section Void Headquarters said, and that he is the actual Star. \n\nGarrett enters the cell after he finds out that the girl knows the real identity of him and Star. So he brings them to a room filled with machines. He imagines to have hundreds of those on Alpha III and he will be able to rule an entire world. Then suddenly the girl takes Garrett\u2019s weapon and Star is able to kill him very quickly. And Commander Weddel, getting the signal that Star tried to send using the metal fork, gets here just on time to capture Garrett\u2019s men. "}
{"id": "63419_1", "pid": "63419_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25780, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Starrett Blade\u2019s ship has crashed into one of the deep stagnant lakes on the surface of Alpha Centauri III, struck down by a Barden energy beam fired by Devil Garrett, a space pirate. Star Blade, ejected to safety and now hiding by the lake, waits for Garrett to come for him. Meanwhile, he wonders about the source of the energy for the Barden Beam, as Garrett doesn\u2019t have power plants on the planet, nor is there running water to generate hydroelectric power. Suddenly, Star notices one of Garrett\u2019s soldiers and ambushes him. \nStar Blade, who has earned the nickname Death Star for his fighting prowess, dispatches his fist adversary, and soon after notices another: a beautiful, dark-haired woman. She confronts him, calling him a pirate. He dismisses this accusation, and asserts his identity, but she does not believe him. A brief fight ensues, but is quickly settled when Star is struck by another combatant.\nAs Star wakes in a cell, he is confronted by Devil Garrett\u2019s face, Garrett\u2019s underlings, and the dark-haired woman. Garrett, who has assumed Star Blade\u2019s identity in order to trick the woman whom he calls Miss Hinton, announces that he will shortly execute Blade, whom he has tricked Hinton into believing is himself. \nStar is brought before a transmitter which only transmits images. As the live image of Commander Weddel, a police officer, appears on the screen, Garrett quickly throws a piece of metal at the transmitter\u2019s dial board and disrupts the transmission. One of Garrett\u2019s men renders Star unconscious. \nStar regains consciousness and finds Hinton in his cell. She reveals that, during the transmission, she was able to read Weddel\u2019s lips and now believes that he is who he claims to be. She introduces herself to be Anne Hinton, daughter of a weapons manufacturer whom Garrett had secretly contacted while posing as Star. Anne tells Star that Garrett has discovered a method of electrolyzing water into its elemental constituents, which Star speculates to be a potential source of energy. \nSuddenly, Garrett enters the room and leads Anne and Star to a cavernous room at gunpoint. The room is full of vats and machinery, which Star concludes are the reaction vessels in which water is electrolyzed and the energy generated. Garrett reveals that his plan is to use his technology to construct many Barden Beams in order to take over the planet. \nStar removes an obscured weapon, and dispatches Devil Garrett. He quickly takes out two more pirates, before two more surrender. Commander Weddel appears, and Star reveals that his damaging the transmitter resulted in a distress signal being sent out.\nThe story concludes with Anna asking how soon the technology discovered by Garrett can be used to bring life to Alpha Centauri III, and her asking him if it would be a good place to honeymoon. \n"}
{"id": "63419_1", "pid": "63419_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25780, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Starrett Blade, a fighter nicknamed \"Death Star\", has been on the hunt for Devil Garrett, the most dangerous and well-known space pirate. While flying over Alpha Centauri III, a barren and lifeless planet, Star's ship is shot down by a Barden beam, causing him to crash into a lake. Confused as to how such a powerful beam could have been shot on this planet, Star is met with one of Garrett's armed men. Star attacks the man and sees a girl, who he is perplexed by. The girl threatens him, and Star replies by explaining that he's not a pirate, but Death Star. The girl immediately attacks him, knocking him out. Star awakes in a room with the girl, some more men, and face to face with Devil Garrett. To his surprise, Garrett addresses him as the deadly pirate, and calls himself Starrett Blade. Star realizes that Garrett has attempted to swap identities with him, convincing the girl that Garrett was actually the one being captured. Garrett tells Star that he is to be executed, broadcasted to the authorities. Star is knocked out again, this time waking up in a cell and rid of all weapons except for his ace card. Two of Garrett's men enter the cell, and Star attempts to fight them both, which is successful, but his plan is cut short when Garrett steps into the room. Star is led to the execution site, where he stands by a transmitter with Garrett in front of him bearing a gun, the girl next to him. Star inspects the transmitter and realizes that there is a chance the authorities will be able to identify him as the true Star, hopeful that the girl will realize her mistake; however, he concludes that the transmitter's sound wave speed would not be fast enough for the message to come through. As Star faces execution, he flings a fork at the transmitter, damaging a unit of the machine and burning it out. This causes a distraction, and Star is attacked by Garrett's men and falls unconscious again, yet this time accompanied by the girl, who knows now of his true identity due to her ability to read lips on the transmitter. The girl reveals she is Anne Hinton, daughter of John Hinton, who manufactures space equipment. Garrett contacted John, disguising himself as Star to gain his support in crafting hundreds of power plants with Barden beams in order to gain control of the entire planet of Alpha III. Once Garrett reveals his plan, Star uses his ace card, which is a jet weapon, to kill him. Together, Anne and Star fight off Garrett's men, and Star reveals that when he flung the fork at the transmitter, it set off a signal attracting the authorities to their location. With that, Commander Weddel arrives and Garrett's men are turned over to him. Garrett's power plants are then used not for the objective to gain dangerous power, but to supply energy and life to the planet."}
{"id": "63419_1", "pid": "63419_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25780, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Starrett\u2019s Blade being destroyed and sinking in a body of water. He was able to save himself because of an emergency release that allowed him to be ejected from the air-locked doors. Star is attacked by a man but successfully kills the man with his electron knife. After he kills the man, he sees a girl that distracts him. While he is distracted, he is struck and beaten. When he wakes up after being beaten, he is standing in front of Garrett. Garrett pretends that he is actually Star, for the benefit of the girl, and pretends that Star is actually Garrett. Garret tells Star that he is going to be executed and puts Star into a prison cell.\n\nStar wakes up in his prison cell and is still concerned about what the girl thinks of him. Star fights against the two guards that come to get him from his cell. He stops fighting them when Garrett appears holding an electron knife, as Star sees that as a dangerous weapon. Star is guided towards the transmitter for his planned executive. However, Star thwarts the execution plans by throwing a metal fork at the transmitter which damages it. Again, he gets distracted because of the girl and is beaten. \n\nLater, the girl appears in his cell trying to help him. She tells him that she is Anne Hinton, the daughter of Old John Hinton. Start mentions that he is familiar with her father. Garrett finds the two trying to escape. He leads them down a long corridor and into an incredibly expansive room.  Garrett tells them his plan to control the world. Star remembers that he has another weapon at his disposal and uses it to kill Garrett. Anne and Star then go on to kill some of the guards. Commander Weddel shows up to Star\u2019s delight after the Commander received a distress signal from the transmitter. Star is excited about Garrett\u2019s power plant as he exclaims that it will bring life to the barren Centauri planets. \n"}
{"id": "63419_2", "pid": "63419_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Garrett and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate for many years, and Star is currently trying to hunt him down. We learn that Garrett has been secretly building machines on Alpha III which, if combine with Hinton ray screens, gives Garrett the power to rule the entire world. A month ago, Garrett captured Anne Hinton and started to pretend that he is Star. He was communicating with Anna\u2019s father about new power processes. Then a month later, Star\u2019s ship gets hit by the energy-beam. However, he survives after his ship fells into the lake, instead he is captured and Garrett wants to execute him. Luckily, he is able to divert Garret\u2019s attention when he is shooting Star, leading him to miss it. Also, since the girl is able to read lips, she realizes that Garrett has been lying to her. She learns Garrett\u2019s true identity as well as Star\u2019s. In the end, as Garrett is showing them his great enterprise and explaining how he will be able to rule the world, he gets careless and Anna takes his weapon. Even though he tries to run, Star is quicker and has better reflexes. Without his weapons, Star easily had him killed."}
{"id": "63419_2", "pid": "63419_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Garrett and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Devil Garrett is the top space pirate, and has been for eight years. Prior to the start of the story, Garrett fires a high-powered Barden energy beam at Starrett Blade\u2019s ship, causing it to crash into a lake on the planet Alpha Centauri III. \nHe confronts the captured Star in the cell, alongside Anne Hinton, the woman responsible for subduing Star. Garrett has been posing as Star and accuses Star of being him, going so far as to forge documents in order to complete his deception of Anne. He plans on executing Star in front of a transmission to Commander Weddel, a police commander. However, the transmission is disrupted when Star throws a piece of metal at the dial board. Star is rendered unconscious once again and returned to his cell.\nAs Star awakens in his cell, Anna reveals that she no longer believes that Garrett is Star. Garrett suddenly enters the room, and, having been found out, leads Star and Anna away to a cavernous chamber housing industrial equipment. He reveals that he is able to hydrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen, and recombine the two to form massive amounts of energy. Garrett plans on exploiting the vast lakes on Alpha Centauri III to perform these reactions, and to build multiple Barden beams which he will use to take over the planet. \nAs Garrett is revealing his plan however, Star unsheathes a hidden jet weapon and kills him. \n"}
{"id": "63419_2", "pid": "63419_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Garrett and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Garrett is an infamous space pirate, wanted by the authorities at a high reward. He is being hunted by Starrett Blade. At the beginning of the story, Garrett shoots down Star's ship and captures him. He is able to convince Anne Hinton and her father that he is actually Starrett Blade, and that the man he captured is actually Garrett. Garrett plans to execute Star, and gets his men to place Star in a cell until then. Once it is time for execution, Garrett is diverted by Star's damage to the transmitter. He admits his plan to Star, confident in his ability to harness power over the planet, but is then killed by Star."}
{"id": "63419_2", "pid": "63419_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Garrett and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Devil Garrett was the number one space pirate for eight years in the void. He has hunted Starrett Blade for the past year. He was infamous because he was a killer. He stood tall at six feet three inches and had incredible strength. He used a high-velocity jet-gun and a set of electron knives as his weapons. \n\nGarrett has Star Blade captured and brought to him. He pretends to the girl on the planet that he is Star Blade and that Star Blade is actually Garrett. He imprisons Star to prevent him from ruining his plans. He tells the real Star that he will be executed. Garrett takes Star on a tour to show him the work that he is accomplishing. He tells Star that he plans to rule the entire world with his work. As he is detailing his plan to Star, Star pulls out a weapon and kills Garrett. As Garrett is dying, he fires his jet-gun at Star but does not kill Star. \n"}
{"id": "63419_3", "pid": "63419_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25784, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Alpha Centauri III, a planet that has many stagnant lakes that are only a few hundred feet across, but a few thousand feet deep. After Star\u2019s ship fells into one of the lakes, he is knocked out and is captured by the girl and Garrett\u2019s people to their craft. He is sitting on a lab chair where he realizes that he is being called \u201cGarrett\u201d instead of Star. He is still super surprised, but then is knocked out again. He wakes up in some kind of cell and is told he will be executed. He is brought to a room to be executed streaming to the Section Void Headquarters with a stellar vision screen. After some distraction, Garrett misses the shot. But Star is knocked out again to be brought back to the cell again. After acknowledging that the girl knows his true identity, Garrett notices them and brought them to see his grand operation that will allow him to rule over the world. However, he dies before he was able to finish introducing the rest of the machineries. "}
{"id": "63419_3", "pid": "63419_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25784, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on the surface of Alpha Centauri III, also known as the most barren planet in space. The surface of the planet is flat, with only lakes disrupting the flatness. The lakes, though only several hundred feet across, are several thousand feet deep. \nAs Starrett Blade, who is also known as Death Star, is taken to the lair of Devil Garrett, a space pirate, the setting changes to an underground space. Star wakes up in a cell, and is then taken to another room with a transmitter to be executed. However, the transmission goes awry, and Star is subdued and returned to his cell. \nUpon waking up again, Star is taken, alongside Anne Hinton, to a room a thousand feet long and five hundred feet wide, filled with machinery, ladders, and catwalks. The machinery includes vats connected to cables, in which the electrolysis of water is performed, and pipes leading from the vats to large engines in which hydrogen and oxygen gas are allowed to combust and turn turbines. \n"}
{"id": "63419_3", "pid": "63419_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25784, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Alpha Centauri III, a barren planet with no life. Star finds himself in Garrett's lair, where he is held in a cell for much of the story. Star's execution takes place after Garrett and Anne have eaten in the dining room, where a large transmitter is located that will broadcast the execution to those across the galaxy. Garrett's place also holds turbines and chambers that would generate energy towards his plan of dominating Alpha III."}
{"id": "63419_3", "pid": "63419_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25784, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Star Blade crouched by some rocks on a tiny lake that is about a couple of hundred feet across but thousands of feet deep. He is on the surface of Alpha Centauri III, the most barren planet in space as it has a mostly flat, rocky surface. There is no running water on the planet, only lakes exist. Tides do not exist on the planet because it does not have a moon which is required for tidal power. \n\nStar is taken to a prison cell by Garrett\u2019s orders. Before his planned execution, Star stands in front of a transmitter that is meant to kill him. He is not killed by the transmitter and returns to his cell. \n\nGarrett shows Star a room that is about a thousand feet long and about 500 feet wide. The room is filled with very large machines and different ladders leading to various sections of the machines. \n"}
{"id": "63419_4", "pid": "63419_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat did Garrett do to make the girl believe that he is Star and Star is Garrett?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25831, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Firstly, a month ago, Garrett pretends to be Star and successfully deceived the girl\u2019s father and was communicating with him about his development on some power processes. And according to the girl, she was captured by Garrett and brought to the craft around a month ago. Note that no one knows what he is really hoping to accomplish by pretending to be Star. Secondly, for the past month, he has been using 3-dimensional images and detailed description of Star as Garrett to make the girl believe his made-up identity. This also finishes successfully and the girl was sure that Star was Garrett, Garret as Star. Thirdly, during the execution, Garrett uses the delay in voice from the visual images to make sure that the girl will not be able to hear anything that the Section Void Headquarters would say when they see Garrett murdering Star. But he lets her see the images so that when their faces are filled with surprises to see Star being captured, the visual images will lead the girl to believe that they are shocked because they see Garret. However, this part of the plan failed. The girl is able to read lips, thus from the visuals, she knows exactly what the headquarters are saying. Hence she learns the truth of Garrett and Star\u2019s identity. She also learns that he has been lying to him and her father. "}
{"id": "63419_4", "pid": "63419_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat did Garrett do to make the girl believe that he is Star and Star is Garrett?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25831, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Prior to meeting the girl, Anne Hinton, Devil Garrett, the top space pirate, had contacted Anne\u2019s father Old John Hinton while posing as Starrett Blade. Garrett\u2019s deception of Anne is furthered by his forgery of certain documents, including papers describing Garrett as having Star\u2019s description, and a three-dimensional picture. \nHis deception, however, is foiled during a transmission between the pirate and Police Commander Weddel which was meant to broadcast Star\u2019s execution. During the silent broadcast, Weddel\u2019s mouth moves and Anne is able to read his lips, coming to believe that Star is who he claims to be. \n"}
{"id": "63419_4", "pid": "63419_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat did Garrett do to make the girl believe that he is Star and Star is Garrett?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25831, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "To make Anne believe that Garrett is Star and Star is Garrett, Garrett communicated with her father, posing as Star and claiming that he was interested in working with him to develop power plants. John Hinton, who supplies Star with much of his equipment, agreed to work with Garrett. Anne has been staying with Garrett for a month, during which he showed her fake papers and photos that supported his lie. Once Anne met Star for the first time, she was under the belief that Garrett was actually Star. Because of this, she immediately thought that Star was lying when he shared his name, and was able to help bring him to Garrett. "}
{"id": "63419_4", "pid": "63419_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat did Garrett do to make the girl believe that he is Star and Star is Garrett?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25831, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Garrett made the girl believe that he was Star and that Star was Garrett because he provided her with papers that he claimed showed a picture of Garrett with a description. The picture was in fact one of Star Blade. In addition, he had his guards pretend that he was Star Blade too. However, unlike the girl, the guards knew that he was actually Garrett. He made the girl fear Star Blade (pretending Star was actually Garrett) by telling the girl that Star was a horrible pirate that killed many people and had to be executed. In addition, the girl\u2019s father communicated with Garrett while he was pretending to be Star. This is another reason she thought she could trust him. "}
{"id": "63419_5", "pid": "63419_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment does Star possess and use throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When Star\u2019s ship is hit by the electric beam, he has an electron knife with him. And when he heard footsteps coming his way, he holds onto it firmly. When the man gets near the water and sees the ship sink, Star quickly kills him with the electron knife by stabbing right to his heart. He takes the man\u2019s jet-gun with him as well. He is also going to use the jet-gun on the girl, but his great reflexes are able to stop him from doing so, however, she paralyzes him first. After he is knocked out and brought to the cell, he looks for his weapons, but they are all taken by Garrett\u2019s men except one. At the place that execution is supposed to take place, Star kicks the metal fork towards the visual transmitter, which will send signals for help. When Garrett takes them to the machinery room, the girl takes the jet weapon from Garrett, Star uses a tiny jet to shoot Garret right before Garret shot him. While Star\u2019s scalp gets injured, he is able to shoot right at Garret\u2019s vitals with his quickness and alertness, thus making him die almost immediately."}
{"id": "63419_5", "pid": "63419_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment does Star possess and use throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Star possesses a jet-gun and an electron blade which he stores on his belt. Additionally, he maintains an additional jet weapon discreetly stored on his person. His primary weapon, the jet-gun, is a deadly weapon, but one which must be reloaded by pressing a loading stuff to slide ammunition into place. His electron blade, stored in a water-proof sheath, is a blade whose full potential is realizable when it is activated. Upon the pressing of its electron stud, the electron blade produces blue fire. The jet weapon, which Star uses to kill Devil Garrett, is slightly smaller than a fountain pen and has thick sides. Star refers to this weapon as his \u201cace\u201d. \n"}
{"id": "63419_5", "pid": "63419_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment does Star possess and use throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Some of the equipment that Star uses in the story is supplied by John Hinton, including the ship he flies at the beginning of the story, which is shot down. Aside from the ship, Star possesses several weapons throughout the story, including an electron knife and a gun. Once Star is captured by Garrett, he is stripped of most of his weapons, except for his hidden \"ace card\", which is revealed to be a jet gun concealed in a smaller form. Star also possesses knowledge of transmitters and their functions; because of this, he is able to use Garrett's transmitter to alert the authorities of his location by breaking a unit of the machine that sends a distress signal. "}
{"id": "63419_5", "pid": "63419_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDEATH STAR\n \n\n By TOM PACE\n \n \n Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl\u2014who wanted him dead.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III\u2014called the most barren planet in space.\n \n Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.\n \n For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.\n \n That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III\u2014if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.\n \n However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.\n \n It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.\n \n His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of \"Death Star.\"\n \n The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.\n \n Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.\n \n The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.\n \n Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.\n \n He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.\n \n While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.\n \n If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.\n \n \n\n \n He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired\u2014the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness\u2014dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.\n \n Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, \"Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !\"\n \n Death Star said, \"That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade.\"\n \n The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. \"Starrett Blade! I\u2014I don't believe ...\" she broke off abruptly. \"So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate.\"\n \n Star reddened. \"Look,\" he snapped, \"I don't know who's been talking to you, but ...\" he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.\n \n Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.\n \n An eternity seemed to pass.\n \n Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.\n \n Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.\n \n That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.\n \n The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.\n \n He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,\n\"Ah, Mr. Garrett.\"\n \n Star's jaw dropped. \"Garrett? What do you\u2014\" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett,\" said the pirate, still smiling softly, \"Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!\"\n \n Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, \"Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?\"\n \n Star said, in a low, cold voice, \"I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!\"\n \n Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.\n \n \"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade....\" She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. \"... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you....\"\n \n Fire leaped in Star's eyes. \"Listen ...\" he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.\n \n \n\n \n When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, \"... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten.\" Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking \"Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!\"\n \n Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.\n \n Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.\n \n There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.\n \n Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!\n \n Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a \"wolf's-head\" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.\n \n His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.\n \n Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. \"Come on, Blade.\" One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.\n \n \"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!\"\n \n Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that \"ace card\" which he still held.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.\n \n Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.\n \n He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.\n \n Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.\n \n The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.\n \n A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in\u2014Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade\u2014then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.\n \n Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.\n \n The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.\n \n The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move\u2014then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....\n \n The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face\u2014surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.\n \n Which was right, in a way.\n \n Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal\u2014a fork\u2014and flung it at the vision transmitter.\n \n Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.\n \n Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.\n \n It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.\n \n Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.\n \n Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.\n \n But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.\n \n It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.\n \n \n\n \n At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of\u2014with no other phrase to do\u2014compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.\n \n In a minute or two, she said tensely, \"Are you all right?\" Star looked up at her.\n \n \"I guess so. Here\u2014give a hand while I get my balance.\" She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. \"I guess I'll be all right, now,\" he smiled. \"My head feels like\u2014say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?\"\n \n She said quickly, breathlessly, \"I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!\" she made a choking sound. \"And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!\"\n \n \"A month? Huh\u2014please\u2014you...?\"\n \n Star took a breath, and started over. \"You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?\"\n \n She said, \"I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?\"\n \n \"Of course!\" said Star. \"He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What\u2014\"\n \n \"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new\u2014or maybe it isn't so new\u2014way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen.\"\n \n \"I think I understand,\" said Star quickly. \"When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be....\"\n \n \"No,\" she shook her head puzzledly. \"It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Star nodded, abstractedly. \"I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?\"\n \n Anne shook her head slowly. \"I don't know. I can't see....\"\n \n \"Perhaps I could help you?\" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.\n \n Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.\n \n Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.\n \n It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.\n \n Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.\n \n His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.\n \n And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.\n \n \n\n \n Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.\n \n The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. \"Well?\"\n \n Garrett smiled his mocking grin. \"You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?\"\n \n \"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?\"\n \n \"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!\" Garrett said.\n\"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!\n \n \"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!\" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.\n \n \"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes....\"\n \n Star twisted, and got his \"ace card\" out of its hiding place.\n \n It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.\n \n He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.\n \n \n\n \n And Devil Garrett died.\n \n There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.\n \n And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.\n \n Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.\n \n Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.\n \n The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, \"Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?\"\n \n There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, \"He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes?\" was the answer. \"Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving.\" Then he lifted his voice.\n\"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Okay,\" threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.\n \n Anne turned to Star. \"Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade,\" she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.\n \n He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, \"Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?\"\n \n Starrett Blade laughed. \"Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.\n \n \"Very simple,\" said Star across the lounge to Anne. \"When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays.\"\n \n \"Yes, I knew that,\" said Anne. \"But how\u2014\"\n \n Starrett grinned again. \"A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces.\" He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. \"See these papers?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?\"\n \n \"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!\"\n \n He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. \"The planets of Centauri!\" he murmured softly. \"Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned back to the window. \"And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!\"\n \n \"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!\"\n \n She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. \"Yes, there ought to be a reason,\" she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.\n \n After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. \"Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?\"\n \n \"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?\"\n \n \"Not half quick enough,\" she murmured happily, \"but it'll have to do, Star.\" Laughing, she turned her face up to his. \"Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment does Star possess and use throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25738, "query_start_index": 25740, "query_end_index": 25812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the beginning, Star uses an electron knife that he keeps in a water-proof covering. The knife produces a blue fire when it is used to stab someone. When Star Blade is about to be executed by the transmitter, he pulls out a metal fork. The metal fork damages the transmitter by striking a small area where there are wires and braces. The metal fork prevents Star from being executed by the transmitter. The last weapon that Star has on him after he has used the previous two is a jet weapon the size of a fountain pen. He uses the jet weapon to kill Garrett. "}
{"id": "49901_1", "pid": "49901_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28392, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed, along with his wife Verana, and their friends Kane, Miller and Marie are out for a walk on the surface of the Moon. They live there, working in the lunar city. They come across a spherical object, about 2 miles in diameter. Miller, a mineralogist, declares that the metal must be at least a few thousand years old. A circular door opens, revealing a small room inside. Kane enters the room. The rest of the group decide to join Kane, but as Miller tries to cross the threshold, he is thrown back. The door shuts behind the group and they are trapped inside. The group try to intercom back to Miller, and then radio back to Lunar City, but all they get is static. The group realise that they are flying through outer space. An inner door opens to reveal a passageway. They arrive at a dead end at the end of the passageway. Just then, a door opens to the right of Kane, an invisible force pushing him into a separate room, and locking the entrance behind him. Marie, his wife is lifted up and placed into a separate chamber. Ed and Verana search the corridor, the remaining doors opening for them. The couple wander around the rooms for eating, sleeping, recreation, bathing and an observatory. A few minutes later, they are joined by Marie and Kane. The two relay how they were told that this ship belongs to an Alien race which arrived on Earth thousands of years ago, and wanted to study humans once they gained the ability of space flight. They mean no harm and want to take them to their planet to study them. They are met by the voice of a faceless artificial intelligence controlling the ship. It informs them there is no way to turn it's course around. The group search the rooms for tools for escape, but soon realise that there is nothing. Kane tries to think of a solution to their problem. Kane starts to drink a liquid like whiskey, which makes him intoxicated. Kane begins to beat himself up. The machine tells him to stop, and that if it arrives with a damaged crew, it's masters will be disappointed. The machine informs the crew that it has no way to physically interact with or restrain them. *blank* brings Kane to his bunker and goes back to his wife to go to sleep. They wake up later, all tied to chairs in the \"kitchen\". Kane has knocked them out in their sleep and restrained them. Kane starts to choke Ed, asking the machine what will happen if the ship arrives to the alien world, and all the crew are dead. The machine would have failed its assignment. Kane proposes that if the machine takes them back to the Moon, then the computer will not have failed, and it might have the chance again to pick up a crew. The machine agrees and takes them on a course for the Moon. "}
{"id": "49901_1", "pid": "49901_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28392, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mankind has moved from Earth and lived on the Moon for over a year. One evening, Ed and his wife Verana, along with Miller, Harry Kane and his wife Marie, decide to take a leisurely stroll on the Moon's surface. As they walk along the path, they stumble upon a strange large object, a spherical figure of metal that, according to Kane, an experienced mineralogist, was several thousand years old. As the group examines the object, they notice an opening forming on its surface. Kane climbs through the opening and convinces the rest of the group to follow him. As Miller climbs through the opening, he is suddenly pushed back onto the ground as the opening shuts, locking the four inside the object. They soon lose connection in their intercoms and realize that the static they hear is due to the fact that the object is beginning to move through outer space. Another door opens, revealing a long corridor, and Ed and the group take off their spacesuits, taking in the oxygen. As they reach the end of the corridor, two doors open as Marie and Kane are shoved into separate rooms. Ed and Verana, now alone, walk back down the corridor where six rooms are open, finding strange food, games, and an observatory. Marie returns in a trance, saying that a telepathic voice had reached out to her in the room and searched her memories. Kane walks in shortly after, enraged, explaining that aliens had taken the group captive after planting the object on the Moon as a booby trap; they are to be on the ship for six months and be experimented on as members of the human race. Kane suggests that the group find a way to take control of the ship, when a mysterious voice fills the room, discouraging him. The voice explains that it is a machine located in the ship, and that its masters want to study the group to fulfill their curiosity about humans. After searching the entirety of the rooms open to them, the group gives up, and Ed and Kane meet in the kitchen while their wives are asleep. Kane comes across a bottle of alcohol, and becomes intoxicated, growing increasingly violent. When he punches the wall, the machine asks him not to hurt himself, as its masters do not want the humans to arrive damaged. The next morning, Ed, Verana, and Marie awake tied to chairs in the kitchen, as Kane walks in, still drunk. Kane has a plan to make the machine let the group go; he strangles Ed, causing the machine to plead, and Kane gives the machine an ultimatum: return the group back to the Moon or bring the group to its masters, dead. The machine agrees to return the group to the Moon just before Ed loses consciousness.\n"}
{"id": "49901_1", "pid": "49901_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28392, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed and his crew are traveling across the Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) on the Moon. They see a smooth metal object protruding from the surface and go closer to investigate. The object looks foreign, and Ed wants to call the Lunar City authorities. However, Kane stops him and says this could be an opportunity to become famous. Ed agrees with Kane\u2019s idea, and Miller explains that the strange object was made thousands of years ago from an even stronger alloy than steel. The crew goes into the steel object through an opening, where Kane tells his wife, Marie, he sees gadgets for controls and weird drawings. Marie climbs through the passage, and Ed helps his wife Verana too. He tries to help Miller through the opening, but an invisible force suddenly pushes Miller out of view. Ed strikes an invisible wall and realizes that the door has closed on them. Suddenly, the lights turn on, and Kane tasks Miller with opening the door from the outside. Miller\u2019s breath disappears soon after, and Ed tries to dial Lunar City but only hears static. They decide to explore the area, and a force suddenly shoves Kane through a door that closes behind him. Only Verana and Ed are left behind. Both of them are scared, and they go through the corridor again to see six open doors. They go into the nearest door and find containers alongside some drawings. Verana recognizes the strange containers as food, and they taste some of it. After exploring, they enter an observatory, where Marie joins them shortly after. She says that something spoke to her telepathically. Kane comes in angrily, and he exclaims that this ship is the booby-trap of a race from another galaxy. The trip is six months long, and a voice suddenly tells them that there is no chance they can bring the ship back to the Moon. The voice is a machine that is part of the ship, and it says that its masters are only curious about humans. The crew does not believe the voice, but they give up after five hours of fruitless searching. Kane gets drunk and has a violent outburst, which causes the machine to plead with him to stop because it will displease its alien masters. The next morning, Ed awakens to him, Marie, and Verana being tied in chairs by Kane. Kane then chokes Ed to show the machine that he is willing to kill everybody on this ship if it does not go back. He bargains with the machine and says that the alien masters will not learn about its failure to deliver live human cargo. The machine agrees to bring them back to the Moon. Kane lets go of Ed\u2019s throat to triumphantly tell him that there is always a solution, while Ed is just happy to breathe again. "}
{"id": "49901_1", "pid": "49901_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28392, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A group of people are walking through a desert on the Moon when they discover a strange object which reminds a part of a sphere. The group decides to explore the object themselves to become wealthy and famous in case it's something important. The party finds a hole and gets inside the sphere. Suddenly, the door closes and leaves Miller, a feeble mineralogist outside. The group tries calling Lunar City but the radio is static as if they were in outer space.Then another door opens revealing a corridor and the party goes there, removing the helmets and breathing normally. Then another door opens and closes after Kane. Marie disappears behind another door in the same way. Ed and Verana are left alone, they are scared, so, when other doors open, Ed walks them both into the nearest one. One room follows another and in the end the couple sits down in an observatory and is soon joined by Marie. The least tells about a telepathic voice searching through her memories and calming her down. When Kane joins, he is angry about being guinea pigs. He explains that they are an experiment for aliens watching Earth develop for thousands of years already. Now the party is trapped and taken to an alien planet for study. While they are discussing the possibility of escape, the ship talks to them and says they can't escape but won't be harmed. It says the aliens are simply curious in examining people. After a full search the group gives up the idea to harm the ship or escape. The women go to sleep and the men are drinking in the kitchen. Ed is calm and curious, while Kane gets even more mad and aggressive than before. Ed drags Kane to the sleeping compartment and leaves with Marie. Ed goes to sleep with his wife. In the night Kane drags all three to the kitchen and ties them to chairs where they wake up. Kane plans to return home by any means and starts tightening his fingers around Ed's throat to make the machine act. After some thinking, the machine decides to return and Kane is proud of his success. "}
{"id": "49901_2", "pid": "49901_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28394, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on the surface of the Moon. The group revels in its beauty and the clear, star filled sky. They soon enter into the alien spaceship. The opening chamber's walls are filled with drawings and instruments. There are \"Kaleidoscopic\" lights that flash on and off. A small door opens to reveal a narrow passageway. The passageway is lined with eight doors, with no way to open them. Kane and Marie are pulled by some invisible forces into the first two rooms. Ed and Verana first enter into the \"kitchen\". It's a large room with shelves running along its walls, full of multicoloured containers and bottles. There is a table and four backless chairs in the centre, and the floor is a shiny green. There are drawings of a naked man and woman eating from the contents of the boxes. The second room is dedicated to recreation. There are numerous containers filled with alien games and books. There are more simple drawings to use as instructions to go along with them. They enter the sleeping quarters next, where the floors are squishy and the lights are ambient and relaxing. They go into a bathroom, with a large bath, alien toilets and soap. They finally enter an observatory. On one side is floor to ceiling see through, and the room is furnished with comfortable chairs. "}
{"id": "49901_2", "pid": "49901_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28394, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The beginning of the story takes place on the Moon's surface, described as a sea of dust and a calm, vast plain. The characters then find a strange object on the Moon, a tall, curved piece of metal. The rest of the story takes place inside this object; first, they find themselves in a strange, small room with walls covered in foreign drawings and lights. Then, they are in a long corridor, where the doors are within the walls without handles. The doors in the corridor open on their own, revealing several different rooms, including a room with colorful boxes of food, a recreational room with games and books, a room with a bathing pool, sleeping quarters, and an observatory with transparent ceilings and walls. The rooms are somewhat recognizable, yet unfamiliar and foreign to the humans."}
{"id": "49901_2", "pid": "49901_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28394, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is initially set on the Moon. The area where Ed and his crew explore consists of a smooth layer of pumice that stretches extremely far. There are also occasional rock islands that go off into the stars above. The Mare Serenitatis also covers three hundred and forty thousand square miles. Lunar City is also on the Moon, and humans have been living there for over a year already. \n\nThe spaceship they board later has a long corridor with multiple rooms. There is a kitchen for food. It is lined with shelves that contain thousands of colored boxes and bottles. The green floor is plastic-like, and at the center, there is a table with four chairs. The chairs have no back and are supported by a single column. As a tutorial, there are drawings on the wall of a man and woman going through the steps of eating. Apart from the food room, there is also a recreation room that has games. All of the instructions are in drawings. The ship also has two sleeping quarters with floors that have a spongy substance and dimly-lit lights. One of the other rooms is similar to a bathroom, with a small bathing pool and running water. Other amenities include yellow soap and a waste-disposal unit. The last room they go to is an observatory. It features transparent walls, a transparent ceiling, and stars that shine outside. There are also comfortable chairs to sit in and observe the stars. \n\n"}
{"id": "49901_2", "pid": "49901_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28394, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on the surface of the Moon, in a smooth desert made of pumice, under cold and faint stars. In the middle of the desert there is a huge alien sphere. Then the setting moves into the room inside the sphere with weird drawings and gadgets. A narrow corridor opens from there, even there the walls seem alien. The doors in the corridor keep opening and closing by themselves behind people. Ed and Verana find themselves in a large room with a table with chairs and food on the shelves. There are also simple drawings on the walls looking like instructions. The next room is a recreation room with games and books, then there are sleeping quarters, a small pool and the last one is an observatory with a transparent wall. Then the characters move throughout the ship and the rooms described. Eventually, the women go to sleep and the men are talking in the kitchen. Then they go to the dormitories. In the morning everyone is in the kitchen, the rest three bound to chairs by Kane. Some events take place in the kitchen and the ship heads back. "}
{"id": "49901_3", "pid": "49901_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Kane's violent drinking outburst have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28430, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed and Kane go to the kitchen and start to sample random bottles and foods. Kane finds a brown bottle filled with a strong liquid. The artificial intelligence explains that it is a liquor intended to mimic something like what the alien race presumed would be created on Earth. He starts to drink it and soon becomes intoxicated. He starts to punch himself and then beats his head against the wall. His knuckles become bloody and he gets a bruise on his head. The computer asks him not to hurt himself, as its masters will be disappointed if they arrive in the alien world injured. The computer has no way to physically interfere with the crew. This hatches an idea in Kane's mind. If the computer arrives with a damaged or even dead crew, then the machine will have failed its assignment.  He threatens to kill the entire crew, which would mean that the machine would arrive on the planet empty handed. He offers the machine an alternative. If it drops them back on Mars, then it will not have really failed, because the only way to truly fail would be to arrive with a dead crew. Additionally, if the machine stayed on the Moon's surface, it might have an opportunity to pick up another crew in the future. This plan is all due to a whiskey-like substance. "}
{"id": "49901_3", "pid": "49901_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Kane's violent drinking outburst have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28430, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kane's violent drinking outburst initially causes him to punch the wall with his fist, causing him to bleed. This causes the machine to respond by pleading with Kane, revealing that its masters ordered it to bring the humans to them unscathed. This revelation about the machine's conditions inspires Kane further, and the next morning, he constructs a plan to get the group off the ship. Still intoxicated, Kane ties up the group, and uses violence against Ed to get the machine to free them. Thus, Kane's outburst, though chaotic and violent, ultimately led to the group's freedom."}
{"id": "49901_3", "pid": "49901_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Kane's violent drinking outburst have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28430, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kane\u2019s violent drinking outburst helps him think of a solution to force the machine to let them go back to the Moon. He initially does not know what to do, but he notices the machine does not want the human passengers getting injured when it desperately tells him to stop beating against the wall. This reaction helps him formulate a plan, and he decides to tie Ed, Verana, and even his wife Marie up. He tries to explain to Ed that the machine is afraid of displeasing its masters, which is why he has found the solution to their problem. His plan, therefore, is to threaten to kill all of them until the machine turns the ship around. He puts it into motion, and it scares the machine enough that it works to convince it to let them go back. "}
{"id": "49901_3", "pid": "49901_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat effect does Kane's violent drinking outburst have on the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28430, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Due to Kane's drinking outburst the machine agrees to return to the Moon. The situation seems to have no solution, but as promised, Kane finds one. If he wasn't drunk, this wouldn't occur him, he wouldn't have enough determination. But Kane's aggressive nature together with alcohol have made him violent enough to make this scene. The machine is confused and doesn't know what to do, Kane's move is clever and he urges the machine to return. This saves the group from being held on an alien planet but it also scares everyone in the group and puts Ed in danger. This action prevents the group from meeting aliens."}
{"id": "49901_4", "pid": "49901_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Marie throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28405, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marie is the wife of Kane, the sharp, brash anti-hero of the story. She begins on the walk with the rest of the crew, ending up on the alien spaceship. When Kane is thrown into a separate room from the rest of the crew, Marie throws herself against the door and tries with all her strength to get it to open, until she herself is put in a separate room. The room is dark, and she is touched by a telepathic voice that tells her not to worry. They won't hurt her, and they only want to learn something about her. The voice seems to search through her memories, looking at her high school days. It also looked at human customs and their lives in general. The room must be filled with some sort of happiness gas, because she comes out of it to join the rest of the crew in an airy, relaxed mood that soon wears off. She then searches the ship for a way to break out with the rest of the group but finds nothing. She goes to sleep with Verana. She wakes up to Kane having tied them all up. When Kane is strangling Ed, she screams at him to stop. Eventually though, the computer lets them go home. "}
{"id": "49901_4", "pid": "49901_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Marie throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28405, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marie is the wife of Harry Kane. She joins Harry, Ed, Miller, and Verana on a walk on the Moon at the beginning of the story. When they encounter the object, she is the second one to enter through its opening, following her husband despite being frightened. Marie and the rest of the group examine the object, walking down its large corridor, when she is suddenly pushed into a room by a mysterious force. Marie is then separated by the group, returning to them later and dizzily explaining how her mind was searched and prodded for memories. Once Marie falls out of her trance and Harry returns, she returns to being frightened and panicking. She rests that night with Verana, and awakes the next morning tied to a chair, where Kane is executing his plan."}
{"id": "49901_4", "pid": "49901_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Marie throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28405, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nMarie is the wife of Harry Kane. She initially follows her husband into the spaceship. Then, after he is pushed into one of the rooms, she floats across the corridor into another room. Marie screams and struggles, but she is taken away regardless. Later, she comes back into the observatory and says a voice spoke to her telepathically when she was in the dark room. She then says that the voice was interested in her memories, especially the high school ones about English and history. However, she could also feel it searching for memories of general life and customs. The voice spoke very nicely to her too, which made her happy and calm. Later, she is frightened again once the machine reveals what is going to happen to them. She cares for Kane after he has his violent outburst but becomes involved in his later plan again. \n\n"}
{"id": "49901_4", "pid": "49901_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Marie throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28405, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marie approaches the sphere together with the whole group and follows Kane, her husband, inside. There she is as scared as everyone, passes the corridor, and when a door closes behind her husband she starts beating it violently. Then she floats into another door which shuts behind screaming Marie. In a while she appears in the observatory with a calm face. She tells about a telepathic voice in the dark which calmed her down and searched through her memories. While she listens to her husband's story about the experiment and their future as prisoners on an alien planet, the calm effect disappears and she is filled with terror of dissection, for example. Then she searches the ship together with the rest of the group without effect and goes to sleep. She was frightened all the way. Soon she is joined by her husband in bed. In the morning she finds herself bound to a chair together with Ed and Verana in the kitchen. She is upset and feels shame for her husband, she is also scared of him choking Ed. She asks her husband to let go of Ed. Eventually, she returns to the Moon together with the group. "}
{"id": "49901_5", "pid": "49901_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28414, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed and Verana are husband and wife. They live together in \"Lunar City, on the Moon, and have for the past year. Together, they're friends with the rest of the group. After Marie climbs into the star ship, Ed asks Verana if she wants to go in. They act as a team, always doing everything together. They are left in the passageway alone after Kane and Marie are taken. Ed holds Verana's hand as they walk down the corridor, a sign of affection. They explore the ship together first, always working together, discovering the meaning of the instructive drawings and the purpose of the different rooms. They sleep together in the same pod. "}
{"id": "49901_5", "pid": "49901_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28414, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed and Verana are husband and wife; the two have a pleasant dynamic and get along well. Before entering the strange object, the two ask each other if they want to go in, rather than trying to convince the other. When the two are left alone after Marie and Kane are taken into separate rooms, they work together to investigate the rest of the corridor and try to piece together bits of information cooperatively. Ed describes Verana as having an inner calmness and peacefulness, noting that it is a unique aspect of her personality. The two are similar in their rational approaches to the situation. "}
{"id": "49901_5", "pid": "49901_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28414, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed and Verana are married to each other. They get along well, and the two of them often stick together. Verana can stay calm in many situations because of an inner serenity that few people possess. On the other hand, Ed also tries to keep calm in most situations but gets nervous if it is potentially dangerous to him or his wife. When Verana is scared after what happens to Marie in the corridor, he puts his arm around her protectively and holds her close. Ed also knows Verana\u2019s interests very well. He is aware that she is part of a group researching extra-sensory perception, and she most likely would have loved the opportunity to experience what Marie had."}
{"id": "49901_5", "pid": "49901_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Snare\n \n \n By RICHARD R. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by WEISS\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 It's easy to find a solution when there is one\u2014the trick is to do it if there is none!\n \n\n \n I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.\n \n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.\n \n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.\n \n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.\n \n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\n \n \n\n \n Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n \n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n \n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n \n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n \n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n \n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached for the radio controls on my suit.\n \n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n \n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.\n \n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n \n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.\n \n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n \n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n \n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old.\"\n \n \n\n \n We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, \"Look!\"\n \n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n \n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the opening.\n \n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.\n \n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n \n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n \n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n \n \"Do you?\"\n \n \"Let's.\"\n \n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.\n \n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.\n \n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.\n \n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. \" Something pushed me!\"\n \n \"Are you all right?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....\n \n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\n \n \n\n \n My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.\n \n \" What happened? \"\n \n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n \n \" What? \"\n \n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n \n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n \n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n \n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.\n \n \"Miller!\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n \n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.\n \n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.\n \n \"Miller, get help!\"\n \n \"I'll\u2014\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n \n \"What happened to him?\"\n \n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n \n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n \n Static grated against my ear drums.\n  Static!\n \n \n \n\n \n I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n \n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n \n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n \n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n \n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless\u2014\" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white\u2014\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n \n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n \n I deactivated my radio.\n \n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.\n \n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.\n \n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.\n \n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.\n \n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n \n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.\n \n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.\n \n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later.\"\n \n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.\n \n \n\n \n At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n \n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n \n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.\n \n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n \n The door closed behind him.\n \n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n \n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n \n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.\n \n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.\n \n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n \n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.\n \n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n \n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n \n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.\n \n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.\n \n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\n \n \n\n \n I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.\n \n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.\n \n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n \n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n \n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n \n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n \n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.\n \n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are food!\"\n \n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n \n \n\n \n \"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n \n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.\n \n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n \n I tasted a small piece.\n \n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n \n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n \n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n \n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\n \n \n\n \n The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n \n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n \n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n \n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n \n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n \n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.\n \n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n \n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n \n She sat next to Verana.\n \n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n \n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice\u2014\"\n \n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n \n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!\"\n \n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n \n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\n \n \n\n \n Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n\" Do you know where we are? \" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!\"\n \n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!\"\n \n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n \n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it\u2014 like rabbits in a snare! \"\n \n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n \n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us.\"\n \n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n \n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n \n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.\n \n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n \n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n \n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n\"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!\"\n \n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.\n \n \n\n \n Verana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n \n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n\"Where are you? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n \n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n \n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n \n \"What are your\u2014your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked anxiously.\n \n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n \n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?\"\n \n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n \n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n \n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\n \n \n\n \n Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.\n \n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.\n \n After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n \n We gave up.\n \n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the \"kitchen.\"\n \n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.\n \n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!\"\n \n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance.\"\n \n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\n \n \n\n \n For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n \n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.\n \n \"Whiskey!\"\n \n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n \n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n \n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.\n \n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \" Why? \" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n \n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.\"\n \n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n\"Shtop me, then!\"\n \n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language.\"\n \n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n \n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n \n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.\n \n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!\n \n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me\u2014somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.\n \n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.\n \n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .\n \n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\n \n \n\n \n When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n \n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.\n \n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.\n \n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n \n \"Awake, huh?\"\n \n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.\n \n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n\"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me.\"\n \n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n \n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution.\"\n \n I grunted my disgust.\n \n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n \n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n \n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n \n \"What remark?\"\n \n \"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\n \n \n\n \n I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.\n \n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n \n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n \n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times.\"\n \n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n \n \" Our machines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n \n \"So what?\"\n \n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you don't know\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n \n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n \n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n \n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n \n \"Watch!\"\n \n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n \n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n \n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n \n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n \n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\n \n \n\n \n The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!\n \n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you return with dead specimens!\"\n \n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n \n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill all of us !\"\n \n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n \n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.\n \n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure.\"\n \n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.\n \n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later.\"\n \n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n \n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n \n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n \n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n \n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28350, "query_start_index": 28352, "query_end_index": 28414, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed and Verana are married. They go side by side through the sphere, hesitating for a second before entry but making this decision together. When they are left alone in the corridor, Ed sees her fear and holds her close. Ed is also scared but he takes charge of the situation to lead his wife, and when other doors open the couple enters together. They follow each other through the rooms and each one does the same actions as another. Ed remembers about Verana's interest in extra-sensory perception and even wonders sarcastically if she is disappointed about not being contacted. The two are relatively calm and secure, they understand that nothing can be done and agree to it. Verana thinks logically and with inner serenity, Ed appreciates it and feels calm and resigned. They are similar and therefore make up a stable couple. Verana is scared for her husband when Kane is choking it as a normal wife would be, but overall the couple is as calm as possible. Moreover, both are rather interested in the aliens and support each other all the way, their couple is harmonious, especially on the contrast."}
{"id": "63860_1", "pid": "63860_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20930, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano is a sickly old man in line to board the space liner Stardust to go home. There is a red signal announcement for the liner, and guests are given an option to receive a refund. Many guests leave after hearing the danger signal, but Shano sticks his ticket into the scanner and moves to get on the liner. Shano chooses to step in anyways despite the dangers, and the Stardust takes off into space again. Captain Menthlo informs him of the Uranian enemy fleets and the high possibility of running into danger with one of them. When the captain realizes Shano's role as a laborer, he makes him sign a waiver because of the possible danger his life will be when they shut off the ship and mechanical device to avoid the enemies. Once he exits to the next deck, he sees the same lieutenant from earlier speak to him again. The lieutenant's name is  Rourke, and he asks why Shano is so anxious to board the ship. Later, as Shano smokes in his cabin, he tries to remember the specific saying for people with nicked jaws. Later, the ship announces that it will now maintain dead silence mode to avoid the Uranian fleets. Shano leaves his room to follow one of the young ensign, who walks by with a blaster. He then realizes that he cannot go back to his room. However, he sees an indistinguishable figure enter the engine room and notices a grey box with switches. Not soon after, the ship enters an offensive attack mode because the Uranian fleets have noticed them. Shano suddenly remembers the rumors to watch out for a man with a nicked jaw because he sells out information to Uranus. He knows that nobody will believe him about a traitor on the ship, so he faces Rourke himself. Shano digs his cigarette into the other man's body and clings to his body. He then twists Rourke's neck with his hands and kills the traitor. The frantic yelling of the other members catches his attention again, and the Stardust informs everybody on board that the ship is midway to Venus. However, there is toxic gas in the engine room now, and nobody on board can withstand the fumes to fix the engines. Although Shano continues to smoke, he does go into the engine room through the emergency exit to fix the space liner. The other crew on the ship are confused by how the liner continues to fly towards Venus. They realize that Shano is working the valve rods in the engine room. Shano thinks about how the Uranian fleet will come into the area and expect to find the Starliner but only find nothing. The fact that this escape is because of him makes him laugh and cough more. "}
{"id": "63860_1", "pid": "63860_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20930, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano awaits with confusing feelings for a spaceship to land in the spaceport and to take him home. Red signal is announced - the travel is dangerous and at one's own risk. The line dissolves and people rush for refunds, Shano decides to travel home anyway. On board the captain explains that a Uranian fleet is on their way and guesses Shano is from Pluto. Soon, there is an order to keep silent on the ship. Alarmed Shano exits the cabin and sneaks around the ship, then there is a short silence followed by emergency. Short orders and a state of anxiety last and then a sudden relief comes - the fight is over. Shano sees Rourke exiting the emergency room and remembers a nick on the jaw to be a sight of trade with Uranus. He starts a fight and chokes the traitor. The selector is gone, there is gas in the engine room and no one can enter to fix the selector. Shano decides to go in as his lungs are damaged by gas already and he will be able to last longer. He works in the engine room and gets the ship going, hoping to reach Earth and die then proving himself useful. "}
{"id": "63860_1", "pid": "63860_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20930, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The main character, Shano, is currently on Q City Spaceport, waiting to board his spaceship that would take him home to die. Shano has gum-clogged lungs, and it was quite an advantage to him when working inside the mines. However, before he could board the ship, an announcement is made about the signal turning red, signifying that there is danger out there, and passengers could travel at their own risk. Shano, desired to go home, decides to take this risk. \n\nHe is the only passenger aboard along with the crew members. The captain of the ship, Menthlo, told him that there is a Uranian fleet on their way. He warns Shano that they will turn the ship off later to avoid detection, and tells him to stay in his cabin. After he sees the kicked jaw of Rourke, the lieutenant of the ship, he heads towards his cabin, where he lays and thinks about the rumors he has heard about nicked jaws. Then captain\u2019s voice comes through the speaker, telling everyone to shut down all machineries and maintain dead silence because the Uranians are listening for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Feeling anxious in his cabin, Shano follows a young man down to the Engine Room. Pausing after seeing a specious figure going into the room, he sees a gray box. Even though everything becomes silent, they are detected by the Uranians. The battle begins. He once again notices the gray box and that the needle inside did not stop, thus he assumes that someone planted it there to make sure the Uranians discover them \u2013 a man sold them out. He immediately assumes that it is the nicked jaw man, he is up to something. Then, after spotting the nicked jaw man suspiciously leaving the emergency door, Rourke, Shano digs the cigarette into his face, and grasps his neck until he stops breathing and drops dead. Then he learns from the captain that a selector has been smashed, and in order to fix it, one has to enter the Engine Room which is filled with toxia gas. He knows that his gum-clogged lungs is able to slow down he consumption of the toxia gas in comparison to other people who breaths the gas. Thus, he enters the Engine Room, and starts to work on the selector. Leaving the captain and the crew in shock, they are finally on their way again. "}
{"id": "63860_1", "pid": "63860_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20930, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano is a retired labourer on Mercury, getting ready to make the journey Home to Earth. As he gets to the spaceport, all the passengers of the spaceship \"Stardust\" are informed that there is a \"red signal\" and passengers are not advised to fly. Shano is old and tired, and just wants to get home so he can die, so he decides to board regardless. He boards the ship with a lieutenant with the notch on his jaw named Rourke, onboard he meets the captain, who advises him to stay in his cabin. The captain informs him that there is a hostile Uranian fleet waiting for them on their path, and they will have to turn all power off during the journey. Shano is intrigued by Rourke and the notch on his jaw, thinking it reminded him of something he had heard once. Shano's lungs are very weak from working on the pluto for so long. Shano goes to his cabin, and the ship goes dark. He opens his doors and walks down the corridor. He sees a figure disappear into the engine room. Suddenly, the captain's voice rings through the intercom. The ship has been spotted by the Uranians, a battle ensues. The crew of the Stardust win this round. Shano notices an electric signal box, which tells of the ships position. He realises something. He remembers what he had heard about the man with the notch on his jaw sold the crew out to Uranus. It was Rourke. Rourke arrives, and Shano attacks him, swiftly killing him. The captain's voice flashes once again that there is an emergency in the engine room. The ship has been hit and everything is dead. Someone has broken through the engine room and it has filled with toxic gas. More Uranian ships are coming, and there's no way to repair the tear in the engine room without being poisoned by the gas. They are stranded. Shano knows that unlike the other men onboard, he can withstand the effects of the gas for a dozen hours, whereas the rest would be dead in a minute. He decides to repair the ship and goes to work in the engine room. He may not die on Earth, but he will save everyone else on board, who will now make it to Venus because of him. "}
{"id": "63860_2", "pid": "63860_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Rourke, and what are his traits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rourke is the lieutenant with the nicked jaw who Shano first meets at the air lock. He initially refuses the ticket and reminds Shano that there is a Red signal placed on the Stardust. He tells Shano that the latter is heading towards his funeral but still ends up punching his ticket. Rourke is indirectly mentioned when Shano asks the captain about nicked jaws, a question to which the captain responds that it happens when somebody has cut himself shaving. Rourke is later revealed to be a traitor loyal to the Uranians and attempts to sabotage the ship so that the Uranian fleet can force the Stardust to surrender. He is a manipulative individual, capable of convincing most crew members that he is innocent and means no harm. He also pretends to act surprised that Shano is on board, knowing that he will betray them to the Uranians. Rourke is also a very sneaky person. When the ship turns off all mechanics to avoid detection, he uses the opportunity to sneak into the engine room and mess up the ship\u2019s controls. He can remain mostly undetected, only seen by Shano as he hurries into the room. "}
{"id": "63860_2", "pid": "63860_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Rourke, and what are his traits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rourke is a lieutenant on the ship who has a nick on his jaw. This is believed to be a feature of those who sell out to Uranus. Rourke is a traitor, he planted an electronic signal box to give away the ship's position and provoke the Uranian attack.He didn't want Shano to get on board and warned him. Rourke is a chunky man with a blaster. He is young, strong and angry at Shano for getting involved. Rourke dies as a consequence of a fight with Shano who considers him a traitor. "}
{"id": "63860_2", "pid": "63860_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Rourke, and what are his traits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rourke is the lieutenant of the ship, who is a nick-jawed Earthman. Rourke first refuses the ticket, stating that it is signal red. After having faint memories within his mind, he takes Shano\u2019s ticket mentioning that it is his funeral. He is staring out to the viewport when Shano spots him later, Shano thinks that he is just idling. Later, he is suspiciously using the Engine Room emergency exit when Shano spots him again. He is chunky and holsters a flat blaster. He has weaker hands than Shano. And is killed by Shano. "}
{"id": "63860_2", "pid": "63860_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Rourke, and what are his traits in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20952, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rourke is the lieutenant of the starship ``Stardust\" who sells out the ship to the Uranians. He is clearly a very crooked character from this one act alone, taking personal gain over the lives of his crew. He is described as \"sullen\" and \"chunky\". His one redeeming quality that could be found would be in when he tried to convince Shano not to board that ship, thus he would have saved his life. He calls Shano an old man, clearly giving off a rude and unpleasant demeanor. He is a shifty, complicated character, because while he sold the ship out to the Uranians, and is not very polite, he did look out for Shano. \n"}
{"id": "63860_3", "pid": "63860_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat do Shano\u2019s occupation and actions thoughts the story reveal about his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20982, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano\u2019s occupation is being a miner and laborer. His time mining on Pluto leaves his lungs permanently damaged, and he has a constant cough that never seems to go away. However, he has been to many other planets as well, including Mars and Uranus. Although Shano is only a lowly miner, his actions also reveal how courageous and righteous he is as a person. His decision to take the liner, despite the red signal, shows that he is willing to take risks to reach his goal. Later, when he remembers why Rourke cannot be trusted, he does not hesitate to take matters into his own hands to deal with the traitor. Shano\u2019s bravery is also shown when he braves the toxic gas to save the liner. He knows that he can last for up to 12 hours at most and that he will most likely die on the trip home. However, this does not deter him if he can get the ship safely to Venus. While Shano\u2019s occupation in the story is not regarded highly, his actions show that he should not be underestimated. "}
{"id": "63860_3", "pid": "63860_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat do Shano\u2019s occupation and actions thoughts the story reveal about his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20982, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano is tired of his life and wants to rest. He goes back home with the thought of dying there. For this reason he puts himself in danger by taking this flight with a red signal - he doesn't have what to live for, only for coming home to die. He is also brave and noble as he saves the whole crew by going to the engine room. He is full of initiative, he can't sit still in the cabin. His mind is not used to thinking, he is a worker but he understands he is the only one who can last in the toxic gas and he understands who the traitor is. His desire to get home alive or dead moves him forward and makes him brave as it is the only sense in his life. He is happy to be of use at least as he feels old and feeble from time to time as he has worked with gas and his lungs are damaged.\n"}
{"id": "63860_3", "pid": "63860_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat do Shano\u2019s occupation and actions thoughts the story reveal about his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20982, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano is very weak, when he coughs his whole body jerk. He also has arthritic joints pain along his limbs. He was digging, lifting, lugging and pounding around the planet for his whole life. He states that he is a laborer. He has worked in the Plutonian mines, where other men died from the toxia gas, he simply got sick because of the gum-clogged lungs. \n\nHe acts impulsively. He has heard rumors about nicked jaws, which lead him to murder Rourke. He does not really feel happy or sad when thinking of going home, but he is determined to go home to die. However, he changes his mind when he heard about the toxia gas in the engine room. When the red signal appears, he still decides to aboard the ship. He knows that he is not used to thinking, but doing works by his hands. Shano knows that he is helping the ship by entering the Engine Room, thus he feels happy. He calls himself useless, but being able to accomplish something as important as killing a spy and driving the ship, he feels good. This is more important than dying at home. "}
{"id": "63860_3", "pid": "63860_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat do Shano\u2019s occupation and actions thoughts the story reveal about his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20982, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Shano is an ex-labourer, working on different planets as he went. He has spent his life \"digging, lifting, lugging and pounding\". He is tired and hates the idea of spending another minute on Mercury. He is frustrated with his position in life, having a bit of a chip on his shoulder, immediately noticing the change in treatment the captain shows him once he realises his occupation. A lifetime of working on his feet has left his body aching, and all he wants to do is get home to die. It seems he has given up in life. He believes that he hasn't lived a life of any note, and he just wants to end it now. He reveals his insecurity through his thoughts, presuming about how the captain and crew see him based on his status. He is wise and has a great memory, being able to rehash a conversation he had with a coworker about a man with a notched jaw. He is clearly resentful of the way he has been treated in life, calling himself an \"ignorant\" man. He is clearly very curious, going outside his bunk when the ship goes dark. He breaks rules and doesn't take orders. He also clearly has a very strong sense of right and wrong, killing Rourke when he realises who he is. He decides he finally wants to be a hero in life, and goes and mends the ship. He displays not only his sense of duty in this but his longing for recognition. "}
{"id": "63860_4", "pid": "63860_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment is employed throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20948, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the main pieces of equipment used on the Stardust liner is a loudspeaker. The primary role of the speaker is to give out instructions to the crew on the ship and makes any important announcements. The men also use phosphorescent bulbs as a light source to navigate their surroundings when the liner goes into total shutdown. Crew members also carry around a blaster for protection, most likely if there is ever a need for self-defense. There is also usage of a ray gun to fight back against the Uranian fleets. To ensure survival, emergency oxygen pipes are used to maintain atmosphere. Shano also carries a pack of cigarettes that do not seem important but later become essential to the story."}
{"id": "63860_4", "pid": "63860_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment is employed throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20948, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The ship is locked with multiple air locks. There is a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot is in earphones. A loud-speaker gives orders. Machinery is stopped and lights are out when ship is hiding from the enemy. For such cases there are emergency oxygen cylinders. Some men have blasters. There were port guns and ray guns and the battle was almost silent. Pipes are all around. There is a screen and a selector in the engine room which keep the ship going. Toxia gas is needed to make the selector work but people can't handle it. There is massive machinery and a shattered gold-gleaming cylinder in the engine room which make the whole ship move. Heavy rods are there which need to be lifted."}
{"id": "63860_4", "pid": "63860_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment is employed throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20948, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Firstly, Shano is wearing polarized goggles, but it is unclear what it is used for. Secondly, there is a gray box next to the pipes at the corner of the passageway, which is used to attract the Uranians detection since its dial needle keeps quivering when everything else went silence. It\u2019s assumed by Shano that this device was planted by the spy of the Uranians. When Shano fights with Rourke, he first uses his cigarette to dug into Rourke\u2019s face and uses his hand to grasp Rouke\u2019s neck, which makes his face turn purple and choked to death. When Shano is fixing the rod, he simply uses his bare hand whenever the rods fall. "}
{"id": "63860_4", "pid": "63860_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat equipment is employed throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20948, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is various equipment employed throughout the story. Phosphorescent bulbs are used when the ship goes dark to light the passageways. A grey box with two switches and a radium dial is used. It is an electric signal box to give away the ship's position. An intercom is employed so the captain can speak to the crew. There are port guns used in battle. Atom motors are employed to keep the ship running. Shano uses the selector valve rods to keep the ship running. \n"}
{"id": "63860_5", "pid": "63860_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20934, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The very first setting of the story is the Q City Spaceport. Many space liners come in and out, making the space very busy. The spaceport also features freighter catapults, long runaways, cradles, and hangars. Inside, there are also ticket scanners and turnstiles that the passengers go through before boarding the ship.\n\nThe second and primary setting is the Stardust space liner. The space liner has an air lock that closes when the ship begins to fly. There is a control room with buttons and seats for the pilot to sit in as well. Although Shano is the only passenger on board, there are many cabins for the passengers to use. The cabin that Shano stays in also has a bunk to sleep on. Other basic parts include numerous steel decks and companionways. Later, the ship is revealed to have an engine room too, where the most crucial mechanical parts of the ship are. These parts are all advanced technology, including a new cosmic drive, selector valves (Carrsteel rods), and tube chambers to keep the filaments operating. These parts are essential to operate the jets of the liner and keep them running smoothly. "}
{"id": "63860_5", "pid": "63860_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20934, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins in the Q City Spaceport. A ship called Stardust lands to set off to Earth. Red signal is on. One old man gets on the ship and the crew is in. On board there is a control room from where one can descend to the next deck with a viewpoint. Then everything is turned off and the whole ship is dark and silent. Shano's cabin is dark and cold. Outside men are hurrying in all directions. Everyone follows the orders, there is an atmosphere of tension. Engine room is the most important place and the selector there is broken, the room is full of toxic gas. There is a massive machinery in the emergency room and a shattered cylinder all in gas with Shano making it work."}
{"id": "63860_5", "pid": "63860_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20934, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story sets in the Q City Spaceport, where the lights flicked and probed the sky. The spaceport appears to be infra red as the ship sank into the light. The speaker in the spaceport makes the announcement stating that the signal has now turned red. Afterward, Shano still decides to aboard the ship, by going through a turnstile connected to a gangway. The ship has a control room which has a panel of studs and a leather seat; there is also a companionway leading to the next deck. In Shano\u2019s cabin, there is a bunk bed; when the ship\u2019s machinery stopped, the room feels cold and dark. From his cabin, there is a passageway leading toward the Engine Room; an emergency exit door connects the Engine Room to the passageway. The passageway also leads to a deck. Above the room is where the captain and the crew were standing. And in the engine room is a smashed selector chamber, which has broken valve rods. "}
{"id": "63860_5", "pid": "63860_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSIGNAL RED\n \n\n By HENRY GUTH\n \n \n They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n \n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n \n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.\n \n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n \n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks\u2014portholes of the liner Stardust \u2014sank slowly down.\n \n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.\n \n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n \n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n \n \" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. \"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n \n \" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. \"\n \n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.\n  Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.\n \n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n \n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.\n \n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n \n \" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ,\" the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n \n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n\"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\" he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.\n \n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n \n The loud-speaker blared. \" Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking\u2014 \"\n \n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.\n \n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.\n \n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\n \n \n\n \n Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n \n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n \n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does.\"\n \n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n \n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n \n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n \n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n \n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n \n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . \"Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's trouble ahead, you know.\"\n \n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.\n \n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n \n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.\n \n \n\n \n The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n \n \" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. \"\n \n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n \n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.\n \n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.\n \n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n \n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n \n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.\n \n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n \n A bell clanged.\n \n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n \n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.\n \n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\n \n \n\n \n The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n \n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \" Emergency. Battle posts. \"\n \n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've heard us.\"\n \n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n \n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home\u2014even to die.\n \n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n \n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n\"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n \n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering\u2014Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.\n \n \"Fire number seven.\"\n \n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n \n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back\u2014pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n \n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n \n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n \n \"Hold fire.\"\n \n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n \n \"Stand by.\"\n \n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.\n \n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....\n \n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty.\"\n \n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .\n \n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n \n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n \n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.\n \n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n \n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n \n Shano blinked.\n \n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n \n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he said.\n \n \n \"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\n \n\n \n He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.\n \n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n \n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.\n \n \n\n \n A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room\u2014report! Engine room\u2014\"\n \n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?\n \n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!\"\n \n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.\n \n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n \n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n \n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n \n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n \n The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n \n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.\n \n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n \n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?\"\n \n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir\u2014they're common tungsten steel\u2014and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n \n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.\n \n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n \n Shano smoked and thought.\n \n \n\n \n They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.\n \n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.\n \n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.\n \n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum.\"\n \n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n \n What was that again? Oh yeah\u2014just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.\n \n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n \n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?\"\n \n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n \n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n \n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....\n \n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n \n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.\n \n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20888, "query_start_index": 20890, "query_end_index": 20934, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is mostly set on the spaceship \"Stardust\". When the story begins, Shano is standing in the dead of night on Mercury, before he goes to the gate to wait for the ship. He quickly boards the vessel. There is an airlock going onto the ship, with two more doors after it. There is a control room where the captain sits in a bucket seat. In Shano's cabin there is a bunk, with a \"riveted studded bulkhead\". The cabin was dark and cold. There is an engine room. At the end of the passageway is a group of pipes in the corner. \n"}
{"id": "55801_1", "pid": "55801_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30615, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Cadet Marshall Farnsworth wakes up at night, frightened by the sound of rockets. He looks in the window and thinks about his upcoming trip to space, as a first man, reflecting upon the history of mankind and space interaction. The next morning he has a short but difficult talk with his anxious parents. Marsh's dad takes him to the Skyharbor, the young man feels uneasy. Then he goes through a check up at psychiatrist's and space surgeon's, revises the route, and takes a nap. Then his Colonel gives him a brief speech, and his cadet friends wish him luck. Thousands of spectators and reporters try to see Marsh on his way to the rocket. Various gadgets are put on Marsh, he rises to the platform, says warm goodbye to the Colonel, and puts the helmet on. Inside the ship Marsh is fastened and final tests take place before he is left alone with his nerves. The last five minutes are long, Marsh thinks about his planet and parents, and then the ship sets off. Minutes seem an eternity, the first phase is behind, and upon reaching the peak velocity the speed starts to drop back. The free-flight orbit is reached and Marsh hears General Forsythe's earthly and calming voice. All the indicators are good and Marsh gets excited to be the first one to leave the rocket and look at the globe from space. He takes all the precautions and the first glance \"downward\" makes him feel like the king of the universe. Suddenly, he feels like he is falling and makes a forbidden movement, which leads to him bouncing from and back to the rocket a couple times, when he has to try hard to stop. When he calms down after the fright, he starts describing what he sees. General orders Marsh to go back and he returns to his cabin. The hardest part begins, as the speed of the ship is high and needs to be reduced. When Marsh succeeds in doing so, the ship heads back to Earth. Marsh has to make a couple spirals and near the airport the braking fuel is gone. Eventually, he manages to exit and breathe the air of Earth and is attacked by the reporters, until he is left with only three men. \n"}
{"id": "55801_1", "pid": "55801_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30615, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Cadet Marshall Farnsworth is chosen out of two hundred cadets to make man's first trip into space. He is considered one of the most stable, but he is still nervous after waking up from a nightmare. Marsh tries to sleep again, but he is unable to because of the anxious footsteps of his mother and father. He finally falls asleep until the alarm goes off in the morning and prepares himself for the big day. Marsh's parents pretend to be happy the next day, but he knows that they do not want him to go. They try to convince themselves that he will be the Farnsworth family celebrity and completely safe in the rocket. When his father drops him off, they share a brief goodbye, and he begins to go through his pre-flight examinations. Further instructions regarding Marsh's take-off time and position are given to him. He manages to sleep for a few more hours before he talks to Colonel Tregasker. The Colonel wishes him luck and brings in ten more cadets who would be Marsh's replacement should he fail the trip. He then escorts Mash to the ship once the speaker announces that there are less than thirty minutes. There are crowds of photographers and newspapermen in the area, looking for a chance to interview Marsh. However, the Colonel leads him to a blockhouse where he puts on his space gear. He puts on a multitude of gadgets, and the two of them get into the cage that takes them to the platform of the third stage. Marsh begins to feel fear, even though there are workmen and engineers preparing the compartment because he also thinks that this may be his death chamber. He says his goodbye to the Colonel, and a man hands him his helmet. He waits inside the compartment, and the rocket launches soon after. The rocket then fires, and Marsh begins to see the mach numbers rise. After seeing the other parts rise, the voice of General Forsythe speaks to him and tells him that everything is going fine so far. When Marsh gets the O.K. signal, he exits the rocket and begins eagerly describing what he sees in space, such as the rotating Earth and the Milky Way. Marsh no longer feels any fear anymore as he observes space. The General then tells him to go back to avoid further danger, and he prepares himself to return to Earth's atmosphere. He comes back safely, sees many familiar sights along the way, and prepares to land the valuable ship. The General reassures him, and he safely returns to the ground again after gliding. Many reporters come to greet him, but the police safely escort him. Only three men are allowed to follow through the cordon."}
{"id": "55801_1", "pid": "55801_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30615, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Cadet Marshall Farnsworth is to be the first man to ever go into space. He wakes up the morning of the day he is meant to take off, and has breakfast with his parents. His Dad drives him to the airport \"Skyharbour\" where the rocket is waiting to launch. Marsh goes through various checks with doctors to make sure he is in shape for flying. Blast off is set for 22:30. As the day goes on he becomes more calm, and goes for a nap in the general's office. He is awoken and goes to met with his CO, Colonel Tregasker. They talk for a while and then are met by Marshall's comrades, who wish him luck. The Colonel and Marshall make their way to the blockhouse, where Marshall changes into his space suit. He is plastered with different wires to convey information back to the station about his state. They move to the elevator that takes them to the door hatch of the rocket. They say their goodbyes and Marsh steps into the compartment. Some final tests are done and then the countdown begins. The rocket blasts off, Marsh being thrown back in his seat in agony. The first part of the rocket breaks off, then the second, until he is left with just his compartment outside of the atmosphere, just as planned. When Marsh gets into a steady orbit, he exits the cabin, attached to the ship by his tether. He talks to the general about what he can see of Earth. He then looks under his feet and gets the sense of falling and becomes panicked, pushing himself to the end of his tether, and then knocking against the ship, back and forth. He eventually regains himself and re-enters the cabin. After that he starts his initial descent, swerving in and out of the atmosphere to avoid burning up on re-entry. Slowly, he makes it down to the surface, using his training. He makes it back in one piece, and is greeted by crowds of people. "}
{"id": "55801_1", "pid": "55801_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30615, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Air Force is getting ready for a rocket blast off the next day. And the rocket is scheduled to blast off at 10:30 PM in the evening. It will go into the orbit around Earth, and once it is stable cadet Marshall Farnsworth, the trained astronaut, will go take a trip to the outside of the rocket, in space, then it would return, carrying Marsh back to Earth. The rocket consists of three parts, where two of them will fall off after the fuel are used and before entering into the orbit. \n\nThe story starts with Marsh having a bad dream about not able to make it to space and back. Apparently, he is not the only one worried, so are his parents. The next morning, his parents tries to act as if they are glad for him, but later his mom was not able to hold it anymore, luckily Dad is able to stop her so that the morning will not be filled with sadness. After Dad drives Marsh to Skyharbor, where the rocket will be blasting, they quickly said goodbye to each other, and Marsh goes to get a physical examination and a briefing. After a quick nap, he is woken up by the colonel and greets his classmates whom he went through the trainings with. \n\nWhen it was thirty minutes until the blast off, the colonel escorts Marsh to the ship to have his gears put on except his helmet. Then, he takes the lift that gets him to the platform surrounding the rocket, where he puts on his helmet and steps into the ship to make sure everything works fine. The countdown goes to zero and the rocket rises into the sky. \n\nAs he keeps on rising, the two parts of the rocket drop as they are supposed to. Then he successfully goes into the orbit as predicted. After a few minutes, he gets the order to leave the rocket. Where he sees the stunning view of Earth from space. Despite a small accident with no injuries, his trip outside the rocket goes well. Then he is ready to get back to Earth. He uses his skills and talents, after a long time, he finally lands safely. After a few seconds of aloneness, men come running and congratulating him. "}
{"id": "55801_2", "pid": "55801_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Marsh's emotions change throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30637, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "During his last night on Earth, Marsh appears to be tense and scared, blaming himself for not being as strong as he wishes to be. He also feels the anxiety of his parents and is sad to see them like that. All the day before the trip, Marsh looks at everything around as if it is the last time he sees it. He feels unprepared and uneasy about parting. At the same time, he is excited, and his pulse goes up, which makes him feel unworthy of the honor. Then Marsh eases a little and even takes a nap. The atmosphere of goodbyes with his team is warm and full of good memories. When Marsh is left alone in the cabin, he becomes scared and thinks about the spectators and his parents, wondering if he sees his home ever again The countdown adds to his anxiety and the last seconds before departure seem an eternity. Marsh tries to concentrate and distract himself from the thoughts. The voice of the general brings ease and seeing how well things go, Marsh gets excited. He feels proud and extremely impressed with the view, forgetting about caution. Suddenly he is afraid to fall and makes a wrong move, which scares him a lot. Calming down after that, Marsh is able to manage himself and complete the mission. When he gets back to Earth he is full of disbelief that he made it, and he is extremely happy to smell the air of home. "}
{"id": "55801_2", "pid": "55801_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Marsh's emotions change throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30637, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marsh is initially nervous before his trip. He feels even worse by his parents' reactions but understands that he must not miss this opportunity. When he sees the doctor briefly after arriving, he cannot help but admit that he is excited to go to space. He begins to feel more at ease after the doctor reassures him and continues to do so up until he sees the rocket. Marsh's helpless feeling and anxiety come back here since he will be going to space. Once he reaches space, however, he is excited by the entirely new perspective of the galaxy he sees in front of him. There is a brief moment where he panics in the frictionless space, but he manages to control himself and becomes more careful. He then continues to try and remain calm for the remainder of the journey back home, knowing that many of the operations required to safely land must be done calmly. "}
{"id": "55801_2", "pid": "55801_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Marsh's emotions change throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30637, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the beginning of the story, Marsh is nervous and has anxiety for the journey ahead. He is sad when talking with his parents at breakfast, not knowing if they'll see them again. As he gets to the Skyharbour, he becomes trepidation, wondering if he was the right man for the job. His nerves calm after he talks with the psychiatrist, and then more as the day progresses. He gets nervous again as the rocket takes off, fearing for his life. He is overcome with joy when he gets to exit the cabin, and see the Earth from above. He is once again stricken with fear when he looks down below, floating in space. His fear starts to creep back in on re-entry, as he could burn up. Once he makes it to the ground, he is filled with a sense of relief, breathing the air he didn't know if he'd ever breathe again. \n"}
{"id": "55801_2", "pid": "55801_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do Marsh's emotions change throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30637, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At first, he was frightened since he even got a nightmare about it. \nWhen the psychiatrist checks for his blood pressure, he confirms with Marsh if he is excited. But he was also scared and wondered if they have the wrong man; he might fail them. After the doctor tells him that he is not the wrong man, he felt more at ease. \nAs he takes the lift to get to the platform surrounding the rocket, Marsh is not as anxious as he was during the day, but his knees felt rubbery. When he talks to the officer up there, his facial expression is twitching uncontrollably despite his effort to smile. \n\nInside the rocket, he thinks of the explosives below him that can literally blow him into nothing; he thinks of being watched by millions of people; and he thinks of his parents. It fells very long before finally getting to the 10 seconds countdown. Then he feels fear. \n\nAfter getting into the designated orbit in space, Marsh feels great to hear a human voice again. \nIt was a stunning view to see Earth from outside his rocket in space. But he suddenly has a uncontrollable panic which hits him on the rocket\u2019s side. He bounces a few times, but did not get hurt. And he becomes calm again. He gets a little worried about the touchdown that his outside controls can provide. In the end, he lands safely. "}
{"id": "55801_3", "pid": "55801_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the impact of the first flight on all the characters in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30659, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marsh, the only person who is to fly, is excited and scared at the same time. He can not believe he is to be the first to exit in space, but he thinks himself not brave and worthy enough, and is afraid to fail everyone. He feels the burden of responsibility for being chosen, which is increased by his duty before his parents to come back and the attention of the huge amount of spectators. Marsh's parents are extremely anxious. The mom struggles to understand why such a young boy is sent, the dad tries to joke and calm down the mom, but they are both afraid Marsh won't come back. The spectators and journalists are excited and interested. The whole team working on the project is also excited and anxious, they try to support Marsh. The Colonel is worried for Marsh, all of them take caution, check everything, and cheer Marsh up. They work on detecting every data, controlling every detail. The whole planet watches closely, while Marsh is the only one to really feel like the king of the universe. "}
{"id": "55801_3", "pid": "55801_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the impact of the first flight on all the characters in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30659, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "For Marsh\u2019s parents, the first flight has a negative impact. While they are proud of him, they are scared that he will get injured or even potentially die during the flight. For Colonel Tregasker, the first flight gives him a sense of accomplishment because he is the one who oversaw Marsh\u2019s training. He is very proud of Marsh for how far he has come. For Marsh himself, this first flight is the result of his hard work in training and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He has prepared long for this moment, and the view that he sees from space makes all of it worthwhile."}
{"id": "55801_3", "pid": "55801_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the impact of the first flight on all the characters in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30659, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is a different impact of the first flight on all the characters in the story. For Marsh, the impact is seen the most. He is overcome with a range of emotions, fear, excitement, happiness, sadness at the prospect of never seeing his parents again. This is the chance of a lifetime for him. This is the journey of his career; to be the first ever man in space. \nThe impact on Mom and Dad is one of fear, worry and anger. They question why the program couldn't have gotten an older person to pilot the rocket, with Mom being particularly ticked off by this. It is mentioned that they always appeared to be happy when Marsh passed various exams, but secretly wished that he had failed, so he could escape the danger. \nColonel Tregasker is proud of Marsh. He is very happy with his Cadet and his achievement. It is clear that the colonel cares deeply for Marsh, hugging him, showing his fear and anxiety for what might happen. This is a great moment for him, but also a moment of great worry. \nThere is a great impact on every character in this story, including the general and Marsh's cadet friends. It is the first flight in which a man has ever gone into space, changing space exploration forever. "}
{"id": "55801_3", "pid": "55801_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the impact of the first flight on all the characters in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30659, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marsh\u2019s parents are worried and does not want him to go since he is still very young. The doctor encourages him before his first flight. The other classmates that he trained with was going to be his successor if he has failed the trip today. The Air Force are able to study the data for month, which are brought back by Marth. The people watching was at first worried about the successfulness of the flight, but they and the reporters congratulates him once he lands. "}
{"id": "55801_4", "pid": "55801_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30618, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The night before the flight Marsh is in his father's temporary apartment with the view of distant Skyharbor. Next morning he leaves the house in his dad's car and gets to the airport. There he visits the doctors and goes to take a nap. Then he enters a room where he says goodbye to his friends. Then he goes to put on all the devices and takes an elevator to the platform. From there he enters the cabin of his spaceship and sets off to space. He moves through the Hemisphere to the Earth orbit. There he stops and exits, finding himself in space. He looks at the globe from there. Marsh heads back then, making circles around the United States and gets back to Sky Harbor. There he exits the ship and goes out.\n"}
{"id": "55801_4", "pid": "55801_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30618, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The beginning of the story is set at his father\u2019s temporary apartment. He can see the Skyharbor from his bedroom window. There is also a room next door for his parents. The apartment also has a kitchen, where his father reads the morning paper and his mother grills eggs in the skillet. \n\nWhen they drive to the airport, some guards surround the premises. Skyharbor is the biggest rocket experimental center in the United States, and there are many amenities dedicated to the preparation of space travel. There is a building for exhaustive checks and briefings, and there is a private room with a cot for General Forsythe. There is also an outside office connecting to the room. Apart from the center itself, a launch site is located further out in the field. Giant searchlights are set up to direct attention to the rocket. There is also a high wire fence that surrounds the launching ramp and blockhouses. The colonel and Marsh go through an open-cage elevator that takes them to a platform on one of the upper stages. \n\nThe rocket has a small compartment for him to sit in, with a contour chair, straps, wires, and cables connecting to a complete circuit. There is also a double hatch and a radio to ensure that Marsh can remain in communication with the authorities on Earth. Once Marsh is in space, he sees a panorama of Earth below him with patches of clouds, a gray atmosphere, and pinpoint lights of night cities. He can also see the stars, the Milky Way, and even Mars."}
{"id": "55801_4", "pid": "55801_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30618, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nThe setting changes as the story progresses. The story begins in Marsh's home, in his bedroom. He then moves into the kitchen. Marsh and his father drive to the small airport known as skyharbour, where the rocket waits. In the airport there are various stations where Marsh is examined. In the general's office at the station is a cot. Marsh and the Colonel then move to the blockhouse. From there, they go into a mesh elevator that takes them to the top of the rocket. The rocket is broken into three parts: Tom, Dick and Harry. The first two break off at different points in Marsh's journey, to allow for maximum propulsion. The cabin that Marsh sits in on his journey is small and cramped. There is a comfy lounging chair which he sits at, and a radio system which allows him to communicate with mission control. Below the rocket, one half of the Earth can be seen in darkness. Marsh notices different American cities and mountain ranges. The rocket then moves to the other side of the planet, where it is daytime. He sees Europe and Asia. On his final descent, Marsh notices different parts of California: the grand canyon, the mountains in san francisco and deserts. He finally touches down in a vast desert in Arizona. "}
{"id": "55801_4", "pid": "55801_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30618, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Earth, and it is their first trip to the space. It starts in Marsh\u2019s room where there is a window and he can see his father\u2019s temporary apartment as well as the Skyharbor. Then later at Skyharbor, he was first checked with a doctor and then went to outside of the office which has an adjoining room. There is a lift next to the platform of the surrounding of the rocket. The rocket has a small compartment in Harry; Dick and Tom are two parts of the rocket that will fall. There is a soft contour chair and straps to be fastened. The Mach shows the speed of the rocket, and the speedometer shows the force pressing on him, as well as an atmospheric heat friction gauge; there is also a temperature gauge on the rocket, and a reflecting prism to see the outside. The rocket has a cramped chamber which can lead him to the outside of the rocket. "}
{"id": "55801_5", "pid": "55801_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of responsibility explored in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30642, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Being the first man to go to space is a task of extreme responsibility. For years, the flight was worked through to make it as safe and well-organized as possible. Due to the need to choose only one man, long training and checkouts took place, and Marsh was decided to be the best. His success is the reason his friends are not able to go and their years of training were in vain. The generals and other higher standing participants trained and chose Marsh, so he has to meet their expectations. The whole globe is watching him with interest and attention, which is an additional pressure. He has to complete the mission successfully, because he was chosen and he can\u2019t fail, he needs to be brave, calm and concentrated. Moreover, he is responsible before his parents to come back, not to make them lose their only son. Detailed instructions were given to him and failing to follow them means proving not good enough. This flight was prepared for too long, and if he fails, he moves the exploration years back. Understanding all of that, Marsh tries to calm him down every time and reminds himself of what has to be done. He does everything with caution, and when he loses control in space, he rapidly recovers and reminds himself to be careful. Under the burden of this responsibility, Marsh doesn\u2019t let himself to get nervous. \n"}
{"id": "55801_5", "pid": "55801_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of responsibility explored in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30642, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The theme of responsibility is explored through the story via Marsh\u2019s own experience in space. Although he undergoes training, Marsh is still given the responsibility of being the person who makes man\u2019s first journey into space. He is responsible when piloting the rocket, too, and can execute all of the instructions that the general gives him. Marsh can safely disconnect the cables and prevent the ship\u2019s delicate instruments from becoming damaged when he goes out to observe. Even during the trickiest part of the operation, Marsh can manually pilot the ship back to Earth. He demonstrates excellent responsibility here, as he manages to safely land and successfully fulfills the mission. "}
{"id": "55801_5", "pid": "55801_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of responsibility explored in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30642, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The theme of responsibility features heavily in this story. Marsh feels the responsibility of the world to succeed in this flight. He doubts whether he was the right man for the job. He feels the responsibility to have the mission be a success for not only his team, but also himself, and his own life. The weight of the world is on his shoulders, and the future of space travel depends on him. \nMom and Dad feel the responsibility to keep their child safe. They are angered by the fact that he was chosen, and wish the space program had picked a grown man. \nThe entire team at the Skyharbour have the responsibility of keeping Marsh safe. They give him a full medical check, and wire him up to know the status of his vitals. \nThe Colonel has the responsibility of keeping a boy safe that he has known for a very long time. He is his CO, and as such, is the main person responsible for him at the station. \nThe general has the responsibility to make sure everything about the mission goes smoothly. \nThere is definitely a very clear theme of responsibility throughout the story. "}
{"id": "55801_5", "pid": "55801_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE\n \n \n Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. \u201cHere I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,\u201d he thought, \u201cand chosen to make man\u2019s first trip into space, yet I\u2019m shaking like a leaf.\u201d\n \n He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father\u2019s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.\n \n 10\n \n As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona\u2019s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950\u2019s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind\u2019s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960\u2019s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975\u2014today\u2014when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.\n \n Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.\n \n In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.\n \n The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for\u2014the goal that had just now been reached.\n \n Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.\n \n He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.\n \n 11\n \n His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn\u2019t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.\n \n The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.\n \n \u201cWell, Mom,\u201d Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, \u201cthe Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t see why they don\u2019t send an older man!\u201d Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. \u201cSending a boy who isn\u2019t even twenty-two\u2014\u201d\n \n \u201cThings are different nowadays, Mom,\u201d Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. \u201cThese days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They\u2019re stronger and more alert than older men\u2014\u201d His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.\n \n \u201c Some body has to go,\u201d Marsh said. \u201cWhy not a younger man without family and responsibility? That\u2019s why they\u2019re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s not younger men I\u2019m talking about!\u201d Mom blurted. \u201cIt\u2019s you, Marsh!\u201d\n \n 12\n \n Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.\n\u201cNow, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.\u201d\n \n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Mom said weakly. \u201cBut Marsh is too young to\u2014\u201d She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.\n \n \u201cStop talking like that!\u201d Dad said. \u201cMarsh is coming back. There\u2019ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man\u2019s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn\u2019t it, Marsh?\u201d\n \n \u201cI hope so, Dad,\u201d Marsh murmured.\n \n \n\n Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.\n \n Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh\u2019s eyes.\n \n Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.\n \n 13\n \n Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh\u2019s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father\u2019s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.\n \n When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.\n \n \u201cPulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,\u201d he said.\n\u201cYou\u2019re excited, aren\u2019t you, son?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh admitted. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.\u201d\n \n The doctor grinned. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the wrong man,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he\u2019d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn\u2019t have it. No, Marshall, there isn\u2019t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You\u2019ll feel better as the day goes on. I\u2019ll see you once more before the blast-off.\u201d\n \n Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.\n \n 14\n \n Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.\n \n He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s almost time, son,\u201d the officer said. \u201cYour CO wants to see you in the outside office.\u201d\n \n Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.\n \n 15\n \n \u201cWell, this is it, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said.\n\u201cHow I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.\u201d\n \n \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,\u201d Marsh said diplomatically.\n \n A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: \u201cX minus forty minutes.\u201d\n \n \u201cWe can\u2019t talk all night, Marshall,\u201d the colonel said briskly. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.\u201d He called into the anteroom, \u201cYou may come in, gentlemen!\u201d\n \n There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G\u2019s, then had rallied to pass the test.\n \n \u201cGood luck, Marsh,\u201d he said.\n \n Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. \u201cAll the luck in the world, Marsh,\u201d he added.\n \n Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.\n \n 16\n \n When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: \u201cX minus thirty minutes,\u201d the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh\u2019s escort to the ship.\n \n Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.\n \n At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.\n \n A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.\n \n 17\n \n Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, \u201cTom,\u201d \u201cDick,\u201d and \u201cHarry.\u201d Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.\n \n The gigantic base, \u201cBig Tom,\u201d was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship\u2019s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re going into that blockhouse over there,\u201d Colonel Tregasker said. \u201cYou\u2019ll don your space gear in there.\u201d\n \n First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet\u2019s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight\u2014to find out a man\u2019s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.\n \n 18\n \n Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.\n \n \n As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: \u201cX minus twenty minutes.\u201d\n \n There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.\n \n Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.\n\u201cGood-by, sir,\u201d he said in a quavering voice.\n\u201cI hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.\u201d He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.\n \n \u201cGood luck, son\u2014lots of it,\u201d the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. \u201cThis is not regulations,\u201d he mumbled gruffly, \u201cbut hang regulations!\u201d He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.\n \n A man brought Marsh\u2019s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.\n \n 19\n \n Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.\n \n Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.\n \n \u201cEverything O.K.?\u201d Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied.\n \n \u201cThen you\u2019re on your own,\u201d were the final ominous words.\n \n \u201cX minus five minutes,\u201d called the speaker.\n \n 20\n \n It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV\u2019s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.\n \n \u201cX minus sixty seconds!\u201d\n \n Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.\n \n \u201cX minus ten seconds\u2014five\u2014four\u2014three\u2014two\u2014one\u2014FIRE!\u201d\n \n There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.\n \n The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G\u2019s on him\u2014equal to half a ton.\n \n He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.\n \n Marsh knew \u201cBig Tom\u201d would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh \u2019chute.\n \n 21\n \n Marsh\u2019s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.\n \n Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. \u201cBig Tom\u201d was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.\n \n There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G\u2019s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise\u201411, 12, 13\u2014to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth\u2019s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.\n \n Mach 14\u201410,000 miles an hour.\n \n \u201cDick\u201d would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.\n \n 22\n \n There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, \u201cHarry,\u201d began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body\u2019s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.\n \n The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles\u2014man\u2019s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the \u201clift\u201d fuel was spent and rocket \u201cHarry\u201d began its free-flight orbit around Earth.\n \n The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.\n \n \u201cCadet Farnsworth,\u201d the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, \u201care you all right?\u201d\n \n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d Marsh replied. \u201cThat is, I think so.\u201d\n \n It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,\u201d the voice went on. \u201cThe doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.\u201d\n \n It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.\n \n 23\n \n Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the \u201cair.\u201d A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.\n \n \u201cHow is your cosmic-ray count?\u201d asked the general.\n \n Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. \u201cIt\u2019s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.\u201d\n \n Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.\n \n \u201cAs soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,\u201d the operations chief said, \u201cyou can leave the rocket.\u201d\n \n When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.\n \n 24\n \n He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship\u2019s transmitter and switched on the ship\u2019s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by \u201cHarry.\u201d Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship\u2019s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.\n \n Then he looked \u201cdownward,\u201d to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.\n \n 25\n \n Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket\u2019s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.\n \n \u201cDescribe some of the things you see, Marshall,\u201d General Forsythe said over Marsh\u2019s helmet receiver.\n\u201cI\u2019ve just cut in a recorder.\u201d\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a scene almost beyond description, sir,\u201d Marsh said into the helmet mike. \u201cThe sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.\u201d\n \n Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.\n \n As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.\n \n 26\n \n He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.\n \n In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket\u2019s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve got to be careful,\u201d he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.\n \n General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.\n \n His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour\u2019s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.\n \n 27\n \n Marsh asked if \u201cTom\u201d and \u201cDick\u201d had landed safely.\n \n \u201c\u2018Tom\u2019 landed near Roswell, New Mexico,\u201d General Forsythe told him, \u201cand the \u2019chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you\u2019d better start back now, Marshall. It\u2019ll take us many months to analyze all the information we\u2019ve gotten. We can\u2019t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don\u2019t want you exposed to the sun\u2019s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.\u201d\n \n Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship\u2019s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.\n \n Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull would do the rest.\n \n 28\n \n This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.\n \n He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial\u2014the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.\n \n It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth\u2019s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.\n \n Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket\u2019s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in \u201cHarry\u2019s\u201d forward braking jets to check his falling speed.\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something else to worry about,\u201d he thought to himself. \u201cWill old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?\u201d\n \n 29\n \n The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.\n \n When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.\n \n A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.\n \n 30\n \n The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.\n \n \u201cEasy does it, Marshall,\u201d the general said quietly into his ear. \u201cYou\u2019re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re just about in.\u201d\n \n The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.\n \n He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.\n \n His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters\u2019 flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of responsibility explored in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30573, "query_start_index": 30575, "query_end_index": 30642, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "We learn that even though Marsh\u2019s Mom and Dad does not want him to go to space, his exploration to the space can bring valuable finding to Earth. Firstly, he was able to spot a meteor that is heading towards Earth. He reports this back. He is also able to bring data back for months of analysis. While his parents hoped he would fail the exams, he passed and becomes the first pilot going into space. It is such an honor for him. Even Marsh himself was thrilled to see Earth from space, especially since he is the first man ever. "}
{"id": "50905_1", "pid": "50905_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jack Barry is a biology student, who sets sail on his boat \"Annie O\". He has sailed out to the furthest island off the coast of Maine. He gets to the shore and docks his boat. He sets out to explore the island. Once he reaches the summit, he finds that there is another island, connected by a thin line of rocks to the one he is on. He climbs down the slope, onto the rocks and crosses to the other side. He arrives at a gate, which he manages to overcome. Beyond the fence is a cottage, with a lawn. The whole scene is old fashioned and slightly eerie. An elderly woman comes out of the house, gets in an old car and drives away. A pretty girl, dressed like a flapper comes out. Jack walks over to her. She asks if he is the man who sends her little boxes. She tells him she lives here with her aunts. They talk for a while, Jack telling her about his professor \" Martin Kesserich\", whom he's staying with. The girl tells Jack her name is Mary Alice Pope. She says she's never been to the mainland, and that she's never met anyone her own age, let alone a man. She explains to him that every morning she receives a little box with a gift inside, and a note, signed by \"Your Lover\". She tells him she was born in the middle of the first world war, and that the year is 1933. Jack tries to convince her that it is in fact 1951. She doesn't believe him. They hear her aunt's car returning, so Jack leaves, telling her he'll be back tomorrow. He makes his way back to the Annie O. Once at sea, he sees the chug boat of one of Mary Alice's aunts, who points what looks like a rifle at him, before turning away to go back to the island. When Jack returns to his professor's home, he asks Mrs Kesserich about Mary Alice. She informs Jack that Mary Alice was the love of her husband's life, who died in 1933. Martin arrives home, and begins a hypothetical discussion with Jack about the possibility of recreating a human being. If you could take the same DNA as the original, and put the copy in the same circumstances as the one before, they would be the same. He tells Jack that he won't be here the following day. Jack wakes up the next morning and sets off for the little island. He brings with him newspapers from the present day to try and convince Mary Alice the truth, that it is in fact 1951, and not 1933. He tells her that she has been a victim of a conspiracy to make her believe it is a different year. He asks her to come back to the mainland with her. She then tells him that she can't, as the man who sends her the boxes is coming tonight. "}
{"id": "50905_1", "pid": "50905_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jack Barry is a biology student under Professor Martin Kesserich, spending the summer studying marine biology. Though he is advised not to sail to the farther islands, one day he decides to anyway, taking his sailboat to a quiet cove. As he sets foot on the island and begins to explore, he realizes that there is another island hidden behind it. Awestruck, Jack heads towards the island and comes across a barbed fence, and beyond it, a cottage. He watches as a woman dressed in a long lace dress enters a car in the driveway and drives off. He then sees a girl in a white dress come out of the cottage, holding a newspaper. Jack approaches the girl, startling her, and she asks him whether he is the man who has been sending her boxes. Jack asks the girl questions, revealing that the woman from earlier is the girl's aunt, who brings her newspapers and other things from the mainland while she remains on the island. The girl offers Jack some lemonade, and he introduces himself, and in return the girl gives her name: Mary Alice Pope. Mary reveals that Jack is the first man she has met in real life, and that though she feels loneliness, she is greeted each morning with a small box containing a gift, all addressed from her \"lover\". Upon asking when the last time Mary visited the mainland was, she says that she was born eighteen years ago, in the middle of the World War. Perplexed, Jack notices that the newspaper Mary is holding is dated 1933. He asks her about the old newspaper, but Mary believes the newspaper is recent, that the current date is 1933 and not 1953, the actual date. Inside the cottage, Jack notices an old recording playing. In a terrified panic, Jack hurries back to his ship as Mary's aunt returns, promising to be back soon. As Jack scrambles to his boat and heads back home, he notices another boat overtake him, steered by a woman resembling those back on the island, but the boat turns back around. Back at the Kesserich's place, Jack asks Mrs. Kesserich if she knows of Mary Alice Pope. Mrs. Kesserich explains that Mary Alice Pope was Martin's fiancee, who died in an accident in 1933; Martin was intensely in love with her, but his sisters disliked her, and one night while waiting for Martin to arrive by train, she fell into the tracks and was killed. Suddenly, Martin enters, eager to tell Jack about his new discoveries about recreating individuals; specifically, about how it could be achieved if you replicated environments for both individuals. Jack comes to a realization, and the next morning he hurries over to the island. He brings recent newspapers for Mary, explaining that she is being manipulated to believe that it is 1933 on purpose. Mary is reluctant and frightened, and Jack tells Mary to follow him."}
{"id": "50905_1", "pid": "50905_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jack Barry sails his boat called the Annie O into a cove. Once he is close enough to the ledge, he scrambles onshore and throws a line around a boulder. He has sailed to the farthest island out from the coast of Maine and decides to look around some more. He enjoys exploring but is surprised to see signs of human life on the island. He sees an older woman come out to drive an ancient Essex. Soon after, a younger girl in a white silk dress emerges too. Jack takes this opportunity to speak to her, and she asks if he is the one sending little boxes. When he says no and explains his reason for being on the island, she says that she and her three aunts live in the area. He tells her that he is a Biology student studying marine ecology under Professor Kesserich, the greatest living biologist. The girl introduces herself as Mary Alice Pope, and they have a conversation about why Mary must be alone all the time. She tells him that she receives boxes from and letters somebody signed \u2018Your Lover\u2019 for as long as she can remember. Jack notices that she has a paper from 1933, and she tries to convince him that it is from the day before yesterday. Mary brings him into the house to show him more proof, and he finds it extremely odd. He then leaves the island on his boat once they hear her aunts coming back. Jack then visits Mrs. Kesserich, who informs him that the original Mary Alice Pope was Martin Kesserich\u2019s fiancee and died in an accident in 1933. She explains how his sisters, Hilda and Hani, hated her for stealing Martin away. However, when the three of them went to visit him during his research on growth and fertilization, they could not prevent Mary Alice\u2019s death. Suddenly, Martin Kesserich comes home. Martin and Jack then have a conversation about individuality, to which the professor reveals the possibility of controlling heredity by will. Jack begins to grow concerned, but Kesserich dismisses his thoughts and changes the topic. The next day, Jack buys half a dozen newspapers when he has his clam chowder and goes back to the island to find Mary Alice. She tells him to go away quickly because he is a wicked man, but he shows her the newspapers. Although Mary Alice tries to reason, he tells her to come with him to prove that she is being made to live a lie that has cut her off from the world.\n"}
{"id": "50905_1", "pid": "50905_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A man observes a quiet cove and a boat for a while, then he moves into the island he has disembarked on, climbs a fence and finds himself inside a huge cottage garden. He sees a woman driving away in an ancient car and then a girl with a newspaper. The stranger greets her and she is terrified as she has never seen a man or anyone except her aunts before. She takes him for someone who has been sending her boxes with some presents accompanied by a note from 'your lover'. Turns out, the girl lives with two aunts who bring her newspapers, books and movies, while she stays home and never goes to the mainland. The man introduces himself as Jack Barry and tells about his marine ecology research for a great biologist Professor Kesserich. Jack lives with the professor and his wife, who told him not to go to these islands and thus stimulated his curiosity. Mary, the girl, tells about being born eighteen years ago in the middle of World War I and startled when Jack sees a headline about Hitler in her newspaper. The girl claims this newspaper dated the year 1933 is two days old while the man knows it is the year 1953. Jack follows her into the house and hears old news on the radio and an approaching car, Mary asks him to leave. He runs towards his boat and sets sail, far away he sees a motorboat and a woman with a rifle. Back home Mrs. Kesserich tells him Mary Alice Pope was Martin Kesserich's fiance and died in a railway accident in 1933. She also shows a photo of the girl Jack met earlier that day. Martin was deeply in love with Mary and his sisters hated her for that. One day all three of them were waiting for Martin's train on their horses and Mary's rushed before the train. Suddenly, the professor returns home and his wife's story ends. The two men talk about biology and the professor brings up the topic of recreating the same individuals. Next day Jack buys modern newspapers and visits Mary. Jack proves to her that the year is 1953 and begs to come with him to the mainland. The girl insists that she has to wait for the man sending her boxes who is coming that night. Jack realizes with terror the man is the professor. \n"}
{"id": "50905_2", "pid": "50905_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One day, Jack Barry goes to explore the little islands off the coast of Maine.  He docks his boat on the first island inside the cove, looking back through its high walls at thousands of tiny islands, dotting the blue sea, and the thin line that is Maine in the distance. Another island is revealed. It is connected to the first by a spine of rocks. At the near side of the second island is a short slope, covered in grass and trees. Beyond the trees is a huge chicken wire fence, topped with barbed wire. Beside the fence is an oak tree, with a low hanging branch. Beyond the fence is a quaint little cottage. There is a neatly mowed lawn in front of it, with a gravel driveway reaching out into the distance. There is another house on the summit of the island, a treehouse, and a chug boat moored in the bay. Jack then returns to the stark, square home of the Kesseriches. There is a solemn, cold air to the place, one that is reflected in Mrs Kesserich. The story then flashes back to the setting in which Mary Alice and Martin Kesserich lived. It is a nondescript place, but one that is open enough to ride horses in, hills sloping down onto train tracks. "}
{"id": "50905_2", "pid": "50905_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The beginning of the story takes place on an island far from Wood's Hole off the coast of Maine, with a quiet, narrow cove that opens into a rocky and green shore. There is another island connected to the first by a spine of rocks, and through the trees and past a fence of barbed wire there is a quaint cottage. The cottage is white with a gravel driveway, and it is decorated with dainty vintage furniture. The inside of the cottage is also decorated with old furniture, dark and brassy. The story also takes place at the Kesserich's residence, a large, lavish house."}
{"id": "50905_2", "pid": "50905_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is initially set on an island that Jack sails to with his boat. The island has rocky ledges by the water and a little green sloop with more rocks and oaks. As he goes further, he notices another higher island that is joined by a rocky spine. The landward part of the spine houses another cove, and he even sees the spheres of sea urchins. There are also many branches of oak and a barbed mesh fence surrounding a white Cape Cod cottage. The cottage itself has a radio aerial stretched along the length of the roof. There is also a short, square-lined ancient Essex parked near the cottage too. Inside the cottage, there is solid old furniture, a small-windowed room, a fireplace, and brass andirons. When he visits Martin Kesserich\u2019s house, it is white and weathered on the outside, with sharp-paned windows. However, the inside of the house has dark, gleaming furniture, Persian rugs, and bronze vases."}
{"id": "50905_2", "pid": "50905_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on an island in a narrow quiet cove near the bustling Atlantic with rocks all around and a boat carried away by wind. The place is unusually quiet compared to others on Earth, surrounded with steepness at first, and going downhill further. The island is surrounded by other islands. Further into the trees there is a huge fence with barbed wire and a mown lawn, a cottage and an ancient car are inside. A woman enters the car and drives away. A girl emerges soon with a newspaper, puts it on the table and watches a squirrel on the lawn. After sitting at the table outside with glasses of lemonade, the girl and the stranger enter the house. The room is dark and small-windowed with old furniture and a fireplace. From there, Jack runs through the lawn, jumps over the fence, runs through the oaks and rocky banks towards his boat and sails to the cross waves. From the middle of the waves and the wind the island seems small. The story moves to Kesserich's house which is a simple white cube with a cupola from the outside but luxurious and dark inside. Jack talks to Mrs. Kesserich in the drawing room and then they move to the gloomy cabinet. Next day Jack wakes up in an empty house and he goes to the same island to visit Mary. The setting changes - it is no longer still, conveying the eerie mood. "}
{"id": "50905_3", "pid": "50905_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Kesserich, and what has happened to him in his past?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Kesserich is a biologist and professor. He lives in a coastal town in Main with his wife. He has taken in Jack Barry, to live with and study under him. He moved to America long ago from Hungary with his two sisters, Hani and Hilda. In America, he meets Mary Alice Pope, a young beautiful, intelligent girl whom he falls in love with. They plan a life together. He will build a house for them to live in and raise a family in. They will travel the world together, he will teach her Hungarian. They will marry. Soon before the day they planned to be their wedding day, Martin is called away to business. He takes the train home after the journey. On his way back, Mary Alice rides on horseback with his two sisters to greet him at the station. But, as Mary Alice sits on her horse on top of a slope overlooking the train tracks, the horse becomes spooked, and gallops down to the rail. She is thrown onto the railway line. Martin sees this, and immediately throws himself out of the moving train to save her. But it's too late. Before he can reach her, she is crushed by the train. He sits, heartbroken, with her body in his hands. Years later, he marries Mrs Kesserich, whom he doesn't seem to have any affection towards, mainly ignoring each other. Treating each other with coldness and a lack of love. "}
{"id": "50905_3", "pid": "50905_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Kesserich, and what has happened to him in his past?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Kesserich is a renowned biologist and professor. He has done a wide range of research and study on topics such as fertilization, heredity, and growth. Despite his success and achievement, Martin has had a rough past. Arriving to America from Hungary with his sisters, he soon fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. The two were infatuated with each other, despite his sisters, Hani and Hilda, despising Mary. One evening, Mary is killed in a railroad accident, and Martin witnesses the death of his fiancee."}
{"id": "50905_3", "pid": "50905_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Kesserich, and what has happened to him in his past?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Kesserich is a famous biologist, physiologist, and geneticist. Jack stays as a student and researches with him as well. In the past, he had come from Hungary with his two sisters Hilda and Hani. He had an intense love for Alice Mary Pope, while his sisters were greatly devoted to him. He was guided by his love and planned many things for the two of them, including travel plans to Buenos Aires, teaching Mary Hungarian to go to Buda-Pesth, and even when he will occupy a chair at the university. He eventually lost Mary Alice in a railway accident when she lost control of her horse during a ride down to the station. "}
{"id": "50905_3", "pid": "50905_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Kesserich, and what has happened to him in his past?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Kesserich is a great biologist, the greatest in Jack's opinion who is his student. Martin is a geneticist and a scientist in human physiology as well. In his past he came with two older sisters from Hungary to America a long time ago. He fell in a deep and all-consuming kind of love with a young girl called Mary Alice at the age of forty. By then the biologist had only two passions - his study and his love, his sisters were jealous and hated the girl. Martin was planning every day of the future together with Mary, he was building a house and approaching the time of marriage. A terrible accident happened in 1933 when he was returning from a work trip, Mary and the sisters were waiting for his train to arrive and Mary's horse rushed to the railway before the train. Mary died and Martin kneeled down before the shattered body on the track. "}
{"id": "50905_4", "pid": "50905_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat has Martin Kesserich done to cope with the loss of Mary Alice?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kesserich devises an elaborate, maniacal scheme to cope with the loss of his beloved fiance Mary Alice Pope. He takes his dead loves ova, and through some kind of unknown science, creates a clone of Mary Alice. He brings the baby to a hidden island, in a cove with high rock walls to keep any intruders out. He creates a setting on the island to seem as if it is 1916. He builds an english cottage with a neat lawn and a eight foot high fence surrounding it to keep unwanted visitors out, and his fiancee's copy in. He employs his two sisters, who are forever devoted to him to raise the child, as if it were this time period which he has fabricated. He sends the girl notes every day, since she was first born, along with gifts like flowers. The notes are always signed with \"Your Lover\". This is all in an attempt to create an exact replica of Mary Alice, in mind, body, and spirit at the very moment he lost her. He has put her in a place made to mimic england, which she grew up in, and the time period as well. By the end of the story, the new Mary Alice is the exact age when the original died. It is Kesserich's plan to finally meet this girl, who has been closed off completely from the outside world."}
{"id": "50905_4", "pid": "50905_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat has Martin Kesserich done to cope with the loss of Mary Alice?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "To cope with the loss of Mary Alice, Martin Kesserich uses his scientific ability. He has been working on potentially being able to recreate another individual at will, to make an exact copy of someone else. Kesserich believes that this can be achieved through biological manipulation as well as mirroring the environment that the individual had experienced. Martin is doing this exact practice on the far out island, where the Mary Alice that Jack encountered is being made to believe that it is 1933, and that she is experiencing past events in real time. Martin is also sending Mary gifts each morning, calling him her lover, in order to manipulate Mary's life into being as close to his late fiancee as possible; Martin believes he can bring Mary Alice back to life, in a way, by recreating her."}
{"id": "50905_4", "pid": "50905_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat has Martin Kesserich done to cope with the loss of Mary Alice?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "To cope with the loss of Mary Alice, Martin Kesserich is trying to create an exact duplicate of her. He indirectly reveals this in his conversation with Jack. He discusses that controlling heredity and environment can essentially allow somebody to create a duplicate individual whenever they want. This revelation means that the Mary Alice Pope, who Jack meets on the island, is the exact duplicate that Martin Kesserich tries to create by making her physically the same and controlling every aspect of her living environment. She is kept away from the mainland so that no external influences can change her from the original Mary Alice. "}
{"id": "50905_4", "pid": "50905_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat has Martin Kesserich done to cope with the loss of Mary Alice?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Kesserich delved into the research regarding the control of heredity and environment in order to recreate an individual. He considered environment to be not as important as heredity and he recreated the hereditary traits of Mary Alice. He placed this recreation on an isolated island nearby with two women looking over her while she grew up. He married his assistant without any warm feelings and has been living with her awaiting for the new Mary Alice to come of age. He has been sending her boxes with incredible gifts and signing 'your lover'. He made her believe she was born around 1916 and the year 1953 to be 1933 in order to recreate the environment. He even kept supplying her with the old newspapers. He wanted to meet her at the same age as the initial Mary Alice was. He never coped with the loss and put his effort and study into this recreation. \n"}
{"id": "50905_5", "pid": "50905_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are the newspapers such an important part of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31289, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The newspapers are such an important part of the story because they are an indicator as to the different characters' understanding of the time period. On the island, Mary Alice is surrounded by many items and artefacts to gaslight her into thinking that the year is 1933. These include the old fashioned car and radio, which plays news from the past. The one main item used to convince her are the newspapers. Hani and Hilda, who refer to themselves as her \"aunts\", give her a new newspaper every day with the date on it. It is a way for her to keep track of the passing time, albeit incorrect. When Jack Barry sees these newspapers and exclaims that they are wrong, Mary Alice is understandably shocked, and doesn't believe him. She doesn't know that newspapers aren't supposed to be yellow, because to her, newspapers have always been yellow. They are also very important to her because even though they are false, they are her only connection to what the outside world is like, apart from the radio, film and books. They are the real time news of what is happening in the world. At the end of the story, Jack Barry takes some current newspapers, in the hopes that he can convince her that the ones she possesses are decades old, and that she is, in fact, living in 1951. She doesn't believe him at first, pointing out that the papers he has could be fake, but when he states that only old papers are yellow, it seems that she begins to believe him. "}
{"id": "50905_5", "pid": "50905_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are the newspapers such an important part of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31289, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The newspaper that Mary is holding when Jack first meets her is visibly old and yellowed, and dated from 1933. This newspaper is what initially makes Jack realize that something is off about Mary and the island. The newspapers are a critical part of Martin's plan in recreating his fiancee in a new individual. He delivers the old newspapers to make Mary Alice believe that the events are happening in real time. In fact, when Jack tries to explain to Mary Alice that she is being manipulated, she uses the old newspapers as her own proof that she is truly in 1933."}
{"id": "50905_5", "pid": "50905_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are the newspapers such an important part of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31289, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Newspapers are an important part of the story because they reveal the lies told to Mary Alice. When she first meets Jack, she shows him the yellowed newspaper and says that it is the morning news from the day before yesterday. When Jack points out that the paper is from many years ago, she refuses to believe him and even implies that he is lying to her. The newspapers also help lead Jack to ask Mrs. Kesserich about Mary Alice Pope and why she believes she is living in 1933. Later, the newspaper from present-day that Jack buys finally convinces Mary Alice that she is living in a simulated lie. Although she is initially suspicious, he does manage to make her see the truth and question why the people around her would lie to her. "}
{"id": "50905_5", "pid": "50905_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nYesterday House\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts\u2014worse for one with none!\n \n\n\n I\n \n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.\n \n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime\u2014gone to the farthest island out.\n \n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.\n \n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks\u2014and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out.\n \n \n\n \n Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing. He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n \n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough.\n \n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm.\n \n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees\u2014and came straight up against an eight-foot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n \n Without pausing for surprise\u2014in fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad\u2014he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n \n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in, had another.\n \n \n\n \n A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n \n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n \n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm.\n \n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across the lawn.\n \n \n\n \n The man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and walked toward her.\n \n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n \n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.\n \n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, \"Are you he?\"\n \n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n \n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n \n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n \n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious.\n \n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n\"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide.\"\n \n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n \n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n \n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here.\"\n \n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n \n She nodded.\n \n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n \n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n \n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n \n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\n \n \n\n \n He'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n \n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n \n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology\u2014that's sort of sea-life patterns\u2014of the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?\"\n \n She shook her head.\n \n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich\u2014he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n \n The girl looked puzzled.\n \n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences, won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich\u2014she's a drab sort of person\u2014said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n \n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.\n \n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n \n \"How would I know?\"\n \n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n \n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n \n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n \n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n \n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n \n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.\"\n \n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n \n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.\"\n \n \"You're joking!\"\n \n \"No, it's true.\"\n \n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\n \n \n\n \n She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me\u2014you're right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.\"\n \n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n \n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n \n 'Ah, love, let us be true\n To one another! for the world, which seems\n To lie before us like a land of dreams,\n So various, so beautiful, so new,\n Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\n Nor certitude\u2014'\"\n \n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n \n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n \n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n \n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n \n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought\u2014\" He began, then stopped because she was blushing.\n \n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n \n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n \n \"But how does this\u2014person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n \n \"I'm not sure.\"\n \n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n \n \"I don't know.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it since you've been to the mainland?\"\n \n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.\"\n \n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n \n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n \n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.\n \n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n \n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n \n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n \n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n \n Big NRA Parade Planned\n \n Balbo Speaks in New York\n \n \n\n \n Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.\n \n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n \n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n \n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n \n \"No, I'm not.\"\n \n \"But it's 1953.\"\n \n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n \n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n \n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n \n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n\"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here.\"\n \n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n \n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n \n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound.\n \n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chug of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons.\n \n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n \n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker.\n \n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n \n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here.\"\n \n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n \n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n \n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n \n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock.\"\n \n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still.\n \n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n \n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\n \n \n\n \n He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n \n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak.\n \n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O. , dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n \n As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.\n \n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n \n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n \n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n \n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n \n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails.\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home\u2014a weathered white cube with narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola\u2014was nothing like its lavish interior.\n \n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n \n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\n \n \n\n \n He asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?\"\n \n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise.\n \n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flat-bosomed dress\u2014flowered rather than white\u2014no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n \n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in 1933.\"\n \n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n \n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n \n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question\u2014he was much too dazed for that\u2014he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa.\n \n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him\u2014or rather about the three of them.\n \n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud\u2014I don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant\u2014and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe.\n \n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But\u2014and here is where Mary's wisdom fell short\u2014her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n \n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\n \n \n\n \n With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.\n \n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well\u2014not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy\u2014\"\n \n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?\"\n \n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.\n \n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n \n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.\n \n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed\u2014to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n \n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary\u2014I mean, what had been Mary\u2014and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n \n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.\n \n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall\u2014a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n \n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n \n The great biologist had come home.\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n \n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n \n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n \n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.\n \n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n \n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that make you you, and me me.\"\n \n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n \n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose\u2014this is just speculation\u2014that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.\"\n \n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n \n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n \n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n \n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?\"\n \n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.\"\n \n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n \n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinx-like face.\n \n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\" the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n\"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n \n Jack looked at him blankly.\n \n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist explained.\n \n \n\n \n IV\n \n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife\u2014things said and half said last night\u2014but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n \n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet\u2014he felt behind it, but the key was gone\u2014he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n \n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n \n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n \n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n \n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n \n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning.\"\n \n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.\"\n \n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are.\"\n \n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n \n \"They would.\"\n \n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n \n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked\u2014some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.\"\n \n \" These papers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let them drop on the ground.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n \n \"But why would they do it to me? Why? \"\n \n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything.\"\n \n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n \n \"He?\"\n \n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n \n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhy are the newspapers such an important part of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31218, "query_start_index": 31220, "query_end_index": 31289, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "For the girl the newspapers are almost the only way to learn something about the world and to divert herself as she is never brought to the mainland. They are also the way Jack learns about her being tricked. He proves his point of it being the year 1953 also by bringing newspapers. Mary's newspapers are yellow which proves their age. The tool for creating the lie and the tool for destroying it is the same in the story. With the help of contemporary newspapers, Jack is able to convince the girl to believe him and to save her from deception. The whole plan of the professor is ruined mainly because of the newspapers. "}
{"id": "50847_1", "pid": "50847_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30636, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "From his shelf Michael watches a juice advertisement. Then a nearby passenger starts a conversation regarding Michael's belonging to a Brotherhood. Michael remembers how the Father Superior proposed the idea for him to live in the outside world to answer the question about reasons for the Brotherhood's resignation from it. The young man makes one mistake after another, violating the laws of the Universe during the short conversation with his respectable companion. The least warns the youth against those mistakes and lets him stick close for a while, then the two listen to the Sirians singing. Suddenly, it turns out that Zosma has joined the United Universe and its rule to always cover the head becomes Universal starting that second. Upon the arrival to Portyork, Michael and his companion cautiously head to eat, and the man keeps enlightening the newcomer. Then they take a ride through the city with Carpenter constantly explaining Michael his new mistakes. During a short following walk, Michael says \"history\" and unintentionally deeply offends a man, who is urged by Carpenter not to report. Then Michael asks for a shower, and they take a taxi to a public lavatory. Advideos keep appearing and annoying the two everywhere. Then Carpenter wants to find a temporary family for Michael to make his stay legal, but the least mentions the desire to create his own permanent family and marry the girl he likes. This statement is the turning point, Carpenter is shocked with the youth's ignorance about marriage being outlawed. Michael in turn is frustrated with the idea of having to share his girl and decides to return to the Brotherhood. Carpenter is even more shocked by the news of both sexes living there together and belonging to one another, so he considers Michael simply unfit for the civilized and comfortable life. Michael, on the contrary, already dreams of coming back home. He takes the same bus and then the same taxi to his Brotherhood. "}
{"id": "50847_1", "pid": "50847_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30636, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael Frey is a member of one of the Brotherhoods, and he leaves his home to explore the outside world. The stranger he talks to asks him why he would join one, and he explains that his father brought him to the Angeleno Brotherhood when he was an infant. The United Universe lives in peace and never engages in wars with one another because every citizen must adapt to the customs of another one. Michael questions Father Superior about the ways of the Brotherhood before coming, and the Father suggests him coming to experience the life of civilization. He meets Pierce B. Carpenter, who hands him a business card and explains that aphrodisiacs are his line of business. He and Michael begin discussing the rules by the United Universe, and Carpenter warns him of the various rules, such as appearing in public with bare hands and that he must be careful. Michael retrieves a pair of yellow gloves from his pack, but Carpenter tells him that wearing yellow is the color of death on Saturn. He settles for rose-colored gloves instead. Carpenter offers to guide him through his stay in Portyork so that Michael will not run into any problems with the law. A stewardess goes around and announces that everybody must now wear some form of head-wearing because of Zosma\u2019s admittance into the Union. Carpenter tells Michael that the universe is constantly expanding, which means that there must be constant updates. He then takes Michael to a \u201cFeeding Station\u201d for some food and offers to take him to the Old Town after. Michael mentions wanting to go to a hotel, but Carpenter explains he should not say these words because of the laws. The two go to Times Square, where the aliens are currently preparing for Christmas. Carpenter continues his tour to a few more locations, such as the Empire State building and Broadway. After, Michael gets himself washed, and Carpenter tells him that they must register him for a family now. Michael mentions getting married to his girlfriend soon, to which Carpenter shockingly tells him not to use that word because it is banned on Earth. He explains that Michael would have to share his girlfriend if he chooses to bring her here. Michael declares that he wants to go back to the Brotherhood, and Carpenter agrees, telling him that he does not adapt well to civilized behavior. Michael goes back to the ancient taxi again, where the driver is not surprised to see him back. He gives one last insult to civilization, which the taxi driver warns him about, and feels content to go home. "}
{"id": "50847_1", "pid": "50847_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30636, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael Frey is a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood, a rural city in comparison to largest spaceport in the United Universe, Portyork. The United Universe consists of many different worlds and is expanding at all times. The story begins with Michael on a jet bus heading towards Portyork looking for a job. He imagines bringing his girl over to get married once he settles down.\n\nMichael was so eager to leave the Brotherhood and to go explore the world that after a year of learning the tabus and customs, he boards the bus heading to Portyork. On the jet bus, Michael meets Pierce B. Carpenter, a board-minded, middle-aged man with brown hair and blue eyes. Carpenter works in the aphrodisiacs industry, and his first thought Michael joined the Brotherhood because he was troubled over a female, then Michael reveals that he has been in the Brother since he was an infant. After accused of breaking a series of laws, which includes talking about fatherhood, wondering about turning the advideo off, not covering his hands, being intolerant, and having yellow colored gloves, Carpenter offers to guide Michael around the city so that he can learn about the civilized behaviors.\n\nPrior to landing, the stewardess announces that Zosma is now a part of the Union. Since they have a custom of not showing their head in public, everyone in the United Universe has to cover their head, thus, the passengers all leave the jet bus after wearing some sort of headgear. Then, Michael states loudly that he is hungry and need to find something to eat. He is immediately rebuked by Carpenter. Everyone in the Union is not allowed to speak of eating, or use any other vulgar language in public since it is a custom for the Theemimians. After checking the map of the landing field, Michael is able to get to a \u201cFeeding Station,\u201d where he chewed on pieces of food that were meant to be swallowed. Afterwards, Michael attempts to break more customs when trying to get to the Old Town. Getting off the taxi, Michael finally offends a being who threatens to report him to the police because he has mentioned the word \u201chistory,\u201d something that the Meropians lack. Carpenter begs the being and blames himself for not warning Michael. Later, Michael interrupts Carpenter, asking for the lavatory. Thus, they get to the Empire State Building, which has been transformed into a lavatory, since, apparently, it has no other use. \n\nOn their way out, Michael mentions his desire for marriage and family with the girl he got. Carpenter is shocked since there\u2019s no marriage in the Union, and family is never permanent. Thus, Michael is determined to leave. Finally, Michael is back to the Brotherhood. He tells the taxi driver about his dislike for civilization. The driver reminds him that civilization is spreading, even to rural areas. However, Michael is happy that he is heading home. "}
{"id": "50847_1", "pid": "50847_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30636, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "While on his way to Earth from the \"Brotherhood\" Michael meets a salesman named Mr. Carpenter. Micheal is moving to Earth in search of a new life, after his father passed away. The Brotherhood is a community that focuses on living in the ways of the past, which would be the present now, in this future society. Micheal and Carpenter begin to chat, but Carpenter soon makes Micheal aware of the social intricacies at play in this new Terran society. Earth is part of what's known as the \"United Universe\" which is a leaf of planets that was created over five hundred years ago. Each planet has different rules and customs, and to avoid conflict in this league, each planet must abide by one another's customs to avoid the chance of war breaking out. A person not abiding by those rules would face charges. Carpenter notices that Micheal keeps breaking these societal rules on their journey, and offers to take him under his wing, and show him around Earth, so he can avoid running into trouble. They arrive in Portyork, noticing all the Aliens that depart from the bus. Carpenter takes Michel to show him around, Micheal repeatedly unintentionally breaking rules. Micheal strats to get frustrated with all of these rules, not understanding the reasons behind them. The final straw comes when Micheal mentions to Carpenter that he has a girl back in the brotherhood whom he intends to marry. Carpenter tells him that marriage was outlawed a long time ago. Micheal decides that life in this civilisation is not worth it. He returns to the brotherhood and to his girlfriend. "}
{"id": "50847_2", "pid": "50847_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kinds of rules were introduced to the United Universe by different planets and for what reasons?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30707, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The United Universe's laws are a combination of laws of every planet involved. Earth has introduced the tabu regarding offending motherhood as it is sacred. Electra has prohibited appearing in public bare handed, because its people have eight fingers on each hand and feel different from others. Yellow is forbidden to wear as it represents death on Saturn. Zosma has just joined the United Universe and introduced the necessity to cover the heads in public, which is immodest on that planet. Theemimians do not eat in public, and so do all other beings in the United Universe. Fomalhautians do not have feet and, therefore, do not walk. So, it's prohibited to walk more than two hundred yards. Zaniahansn are like bees and go everywhere with their families, therefore, one can not travel alone in the universe. Nekkarians say and imply only what is true. Meropians do not have history and this word is offending for them, and forbidden, therefore. On Talitha marriage is slavery, and so is it on other planets. "}
{"id": "50847_2", "pid": "50847_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kinds of rules were introduced to the United Universe by different planets and for what reasons?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30707, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There are many rules introduced to the United Universe by different planets that affect what citizens can wear, say, or even do with their lives. One of the rules introduced by the United Universe is an Earth tabu. The story says that Motherhood is sacred on Earth and the entire universe, so talking about anything that contradicts it is the same as violating the law. Another rule is that one must not violate the spirit of free enterprise and cause ego injury. This rule allows advertisers to continue creating their constant advideos. In terms of what one can wear, it is illegal on Electra to appear in public with bare hands and immodest to appear without a head covering on Zosma. Even talking about eating is considered vulgar to Theemimian, while the disgusting aroma of the Algedian cab is a scent that must be enjoyed. Meropians are also extremely sensitive to word history, making it illegal to say around them. On Earth, it is also considered unthinkable to go anywhere without a family because of the Zaniahans. Despite needing a family, marriage is illegal because it is considered slavery on Talitha. These rules are all introduced and accepted as a means of keeping the universe together. The Wise Ones believe that keeping every custom, rule, and habit the same will foster universal peace. "}
{"id": "50847_2", "pid": "50847_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kinds of rules were introduced to the United Universe by different planets and for what reasons?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30707, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "It is considered a crime to injure another through word or action, thus customs and laws of each planet are considered laws of all other planets. Firstly, courteous is an important rule of the United Universe. Secondly, motherhood is sacred on Earth, thus it was introduced to the United Universe and all planets have to consider it sacred. Moreover, the advideos cannot be turned off since it would hurt the spirit of free enterprise; hands are forbidden to be bare in public since Electrans have eight fingers on each hand and two nails on each finger, which are covered in green scales; and yellow cannot be wore since it is the color of death on Saturn. On the jet bus, they are told that Zosma has been just admitted to the Union and the people there do not appear with bare head in public, thus from now on, everyone has to wear some sort of headgear in public. Furthermore, Theemimians are afraid of vulgar, thus any vulgar words such as eating cannot be stated in public; Fomalhautians do not walk, thus it is forbidden for everyone in the Union to walk more than two hundred yards in one direction. Ego injury is also considered a crime. Surprisingly, the word \u201chotel\u201d cannot be mentioned since it means a place of dancing girls in the current society; \u201clodging\u201d is offensive to the Zaniahans since they almost always travel with a family; \u201cmarried\u201d was outlawed years ago because Talithas consider the exclusive possession of a opposite sex as slavery; \u201chistory\u201d pisses the Meropians off since they do not have any history, they went from barbaric to civilized in one generation, and historical buildings such as the Empire State was considered useless. Finally, Times Square is actually a square because the Nekkars do not allow anything that is not true to exist; and it is illegal to interrupt someone when they are speaking. "}
{"id": "50847_2", "pid": "50847_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kinds of rules were introduced to the United Universe by different planets and for what reasons?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30707, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There were many rules introduced by the united universe for various reasons. It is forbidden to appear in public with your hands held by Electra because they have eight fingers, two of them being very ugly. You aren't allowed to wear yellow on Saturn, as it is the color of death. On Zosma it is illegal to appear with you head bare. On Them It is vulgar to speak about eating in public. The Fomalhaut Incas have made it illegal to walk more than two hundred feet in any direction. Because of the Zaniahan's it is forbidden to stay anywhere without one's family. On Nekkar, it is illegal to do, say or imply anything that isn;t true. The word history is not allowed because the Meropians deem it to be insulting. MArriage in earth was outlawed. \n"}
{"id": "50847_3", "pid": "50847_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30639, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The narration begins on a bus shelf where the main character lies. Then he arrives at Portyork, a huge spaceport on Earth, where Michael and Mr. Carpenter head to the nearest feeding station following the map. There Michael alone is admitted into a tiny room to eat. When he finishes, the two take a trip to the Old Town by taxi. In the cab they crossed Portyork, looking at the cosmopolitan architecture and people. They exit the taxi at Times Square which is indeed in the shape of a square and is decorated for the New Year in green and red though it's July. The two walk a little to Broadway and then. take another can to a public lavatory. There, in the elevator, Michael sees many foreigners again. When they leave the lavatory, the two have an argument and go different ways. In the next scene Michaels appears on a shelf on his way back to Angeles, to the Lodge and the Brotherhood. Upon arrival, he takes the same taxi back home. \n"}
{"id": "50847_3", "pid": "50847_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30639, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Earth. Michael and Carpenter initially travel to Portyork via a jet bus. There is a level on the bus that drops his pack from the storage compartment. There are also no seats on the jet bus to accommodate the numerous types of life forms. Portyork is a cosmopolitan city filled with many different forms of architecture. There are silver dome buildings belonging to Earth origins and tall, helical Venusian buildings. Many different extraterrestrials inhabit the city too. The feeding station room Carpenter brings Michael has a slot for a two-credit piece. The tiny room itself has only a chair, table, food compartment, and advideo. Times Square is a square meadow with transparent domes, housing many antique clocks that run by twenty-four hours instead of the standard thirty. There are also many green and red decorations put out to prepare for Christmas. Broadway has boogil trees from Dschubba, and the Empire State Building still looks the same as in the pictures, except there is a huge \u201cPublic Washport\u201d sign. There is a circular desk to direct traffic from and many different floors for each extraterrestrial species. "}
{"id": "50847_3", "pid": "50847_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30639, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place when Christmas is almost here, it\u2019s July. It begins with the jet bus heading towards Portyork. The jet bus don\u2019t have any seats since it was proven to be the most suitable way for different life-forms. The bus has an illuminated panel on a shelf, where Michael and Carpenter lie; and there is a storage compartment on the bus, and it can drop the bags that is stored within it using a lever. \n\nThe landing field has a large map that shows the location of the \u201cFeeding Station\u201d to Carpenter. Walking into the small and austere room that has a sliding door at the station, Michael sees that there is only a table, a chair, a food compartment and an advideo, and nothing else. \nPortyork is the largest spaceport in the United Universe and the city with the most cosmopolitan architectures and diverse group of inhabitants. Eventually, Michael gets a better view of the city of Portyork on the taxi, after he gets used to the Tpiu Number Five aroma. He sees the Silver domes of Earth as well as the tall helical buildings of the Venusians, standing right next to the domes. There are houses in Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones style due to the medieval architecture revival that is taking place there. Michael also notes the streamers and red and green balls on the street, which are lit even when there\u2019s daylight. Getting off of the taxi, Michael and Carpenter arrive at the Time Square, which is actually a square now. It is filled with clocks inside transparent plastic domes, where most of those clocks are 24-hr clock; a few have 30-hr, which is the standard nowadays. Broadway is filled with shades from the boogil trees. The Empire State Building looks just like the pictures in his history book, but a \u201cPublic-Washport\u201d sign was there. There is a large circular desk in the lobby, where the attendants directed the guests to the elevators. "}
{"id": "50847_3", "pid": "50847_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30639, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The setting of the story is earth. When we first meet Micheal, he is on a bus, travelling to Portyork. It is a city that has clearly evolved from New York. The bus is uncomfortable to Micheal, as everyone on it has to lie down. The bus finally stops on the landing field. They depart from the bus into the outer edges of the city. Micheal goes into a small, white plain building which is marked as a feeding station to nourish himself. In the building is a table and chair, a food compartment and an advideo. The heart of the city is described as \"Old Town\". Portyork is the biggest spaceport in the United Universe. There are silver domes of earth, clustered by towing edifices of the Venusians. There are red and green balls that glow, lighting the streets. There are long red and green streamers lining the streets. They are transported to a square meadow, with plastic domes containing different types of clocks dotted throughout. It is Times square. There is a lovely walkway that is lined by \"boogil trees\". It is broadway. The empire state building has been converted into a washing station and lavatory, with different floors for different species. "}
{"id": "50847_4", "pid": "50847_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the meaning of the trip back for the whole story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30663, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The final passages reflect how Michael's attitude towards the outside world has changed. The Sirians' song, which sparked curiosity in him in the beginning of the story, annoys him now and makes him miss home even more. The advideo is annoying as well, as those are all over the universe and can't be turned off. Those are the annoying features of the world about which nothing can be done, and for Michael one day was enough to get tired of them. Michael has fulfilled the purpose of his visit to Earth, he understands now why the Brotherhood is so isolated from the world and he likes it. He starts missing home and his girl in one day on Earth and gladly decides to return. The Earth experience makes him sure in how he wants to live in the future - in the Brotherhood, without the constant fear of mistakes and restrictions on every step, married to his girl. The civilization seems awful to the youth, but it is spreading, as the taxi driver says. Nevertheless, Michael doesn't care about it, he feels safe in Brotherhood, and it is definitely the right place for him."}
{"id": "50847_4", "pid": "50847_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the meaning of the trip back for the whole story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30663, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The meaning of the trip back is to show Michael\u2019s development throughout the story and how he has matured into realizing that he is much more suited for life at the Brotherhood than under the rules of the United Universe. This directly contrasts his initial plan too. He, at first, wants to move to Earth and away from the Brotherhood, thinking of how it would let him start a much more exciting new life. However, the trip back shows just how unadaptable he is to the strict customs that exist and constantly expand. When he realizes this, the trip back symbolizes his maturity and realization that life back home is what is much more suited for anyways. "}
{"id": "50847_4", "pid": "50847_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the meaning of the trip back for the whole story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30663, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The meaning of the trip back to the Brotherhood means that Michael does not like the way that the civilized live. He specifically mentions that he is not staying in Portyork after hearing that if he brings his girl, they cannot permanently get married, since following the custom of Talitha, one cannot have exclusive possession over one from the other sex. Simply stated, he have to share her and she have to share him if anyone wishes to have either of them. Moreover, stating that the females at the Brotherhood don\u2019t mind being generic shows that Michael does not praise the numerous tabus and customs that they have to follow simply because another planet is following it. "}
{"id": "50847_4", "pid": "50847_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the meaning of the trip back for the whole story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30663, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The trip back means that the civilisation of the United Universe is spreading. Soon, the brotherhood will be taken over. There will be no trace of the old world. there will be nowhere to escape from this constant fear of saying the wrong thing by mistake, and ending up breaking the law. There will be no more love, or monogamous relationships. Micheal and his girlfriend might never get married. They might never be able to have a family. So many planets will eventually join that no one will be able to do or say anything at all, and the things that make different cultures special will be lost, as they offend another. \n"}
{"id": "50847_5", "pid": "50847_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Michael and Mr. Carpenter?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30665, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Carpenter is the first acquaintance Michael makes on his trip into the world. They are companions on the bus to Portyork. At first, Michael is unwilling to talk and Carpenter is curious to know about the reasons for the former to join a Brotherhood. Soon, Carpenter realizes that Michael is unfamiliar with the ways of this world and decides to take charge and show the youth around. Carpenter forgives Michael's every mistake and explains it, warning the youth to become silent in case of danger. Carpenter is more forgiving and kind than many other citizens, which is the reason for him taking charge of Michael. The man shows the newcomer around the city and prevents him from getting in trouble. Carpenter even defends Michael before an offended Meropian, who wants to report to the police. Things change when Michael begins an argument with Carpenter regarding marriage, which has been outlawed. Michael's desire to possess his girl alone contradicts the norms of the world and the youth's obstinance in this desire shock Carpenter completely. When he learns that in the Brotherhood both sexes are represented and marriage, which equals slavery to him, exists, Carpenter becomes sure that Michael can't adapt to the civilized world. After that, each goes his way.\n"}
{"id": "50847_5", "pid": "50847_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Michael and Mr. Carpenter?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30665, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mr. Carpenter are travel companions for the duration of his stay in Portyork. Mr. Carpenter first befriends Michael on the jet bus, and he decides to take the latter around after seeing that Michael does not know his way around Earth. He is quick to inform Michael of the rules of the United Universe and always corrects him immediately whenever there is a problem. Mr. Carpenter is very knowledgeable about Portyork, the rules of the United Universe, and even the extraterrestrials. Although he does get fearful of Michael\u2019s illegal outbursts, he is kind enough not to report him to the police and teach him instead. While Mr. Carpenter concludes that Michael is unsuited for life on Earth and the United Universe, there is no bad blood between them, and Michael learns a lot from him. \n"}
{"id": "50847_5", "pid": "50847_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Michael and Mr. Carpenter?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30665, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael first met Mr. Carpenter on the jet bus heading towards Portyork. Carpenter notices that Michael comes from the Brotherhood and assumed that he was there because of trouble over women. Then Michael reveals that he has been in the Brotherhood for almost his whole life. After being reminded of a few tabus and customs that Michael is not even aware off, Carpenter asks Michael to stick around him for a while since he is unfamiliar with the civilized behaviors and can easily get in trouble. After exiting the jet bus, Carpenter mentions to Michael that he does not have anything to do this moment, thus he can show him around. Carpenter helps Michael to find the position of a \u201cFeeding Station\u201d so that he can get some food. Afterwards, Michael attempts to break more customs when trying to get to the Old Town. However, they were all stopped by Carpenter before anyone notices it. However, getting off the taxi, a being notices Carpenter stating the word \u201chistory\u201d and threatens to report him to the police because history is something that the Meropians lack. Carpenter begs the being and blames himself for not warning Michael. Later, Michael interrupts Carpenter, asking for the lavatory. Thus, they get to the Empire State Building, which has been transformed into a lavatory, since, apparently, it has no other use. On their way out, Carpenter is shocked at Michael desiring for a permanent family, since there\u2019s no marriage in the Union, and family is never permanent. Carpenter is very openminded, and agrees that there are individuals that do not apapt themselves to the civilization, the Brotherhood is a much better option for them. Later, Michael heads home to his Brotherhood.  "}
{"id": "50847_5", "pid": "50847_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTea Tray in the Sky\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\n \n\n \n The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.\n \n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Merop\u00e9.\"\n \n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.\n \n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n \n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n \n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n \n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a female?\"\n \n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered.\"\n \n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother.\"\n \n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n \n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n \n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful, young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n \n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n \n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.\n \n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems\u2014injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).\n \n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past\u2014the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n \n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n \n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\n \n \n\n \n A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n \n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n \n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n \n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured, abashed.\n \n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.\n \n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n\"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n \n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands....\"\n \n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n \n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n \n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got to do with me?\"\n \n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n \n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n\"with two fingernails on each\u2014all covered with green scales.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n \n \"Of course not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n \n \"Certainly not, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Would you like to be called guilty of\u2014\" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word\u2014\" intolerance ?\"\n \n \"No, no, no !\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away.\"\n \n \n\n \n With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.\n \n Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.\n \n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n \n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n\"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega.\"\n \n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n \n He twisted himself around\u2014it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably\u2014and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n \n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n \n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n \n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.\n \n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n \n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n \n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n \n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n \n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n\"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning.\"\n \n All the passengers cheered.\n \n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n \n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n \n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.\n \n \n\n \n \"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n\"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n \n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n \n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders\u2014humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians\u2014but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n \n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n \n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\" Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n \n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n \n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?\"\n \n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?\"\n \n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n \n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n \n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n \n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n \n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\n \n \n\n \n Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n \n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n \n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n \n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n \n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:\n \n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n \n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n \n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n \n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.\n \n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi.\"\n \n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button\u2014it won't cost you nuttin'\u2014see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza.\"\n \n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth.\"\n \n \"Couldn't we\u2014couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael faltered.\n \n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n \n \"But they have no feet.\"\n \n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\n \n \n\n \n Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n \n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n \n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city\u2014cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.\n \n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n \n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n \n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular....\"\n \n \n\n \n \"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before.\"\n \n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea.\"\n \n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n \n \"The word hotel ,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means\u2014a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n \n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n \n \"That word is also\u2014well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n \n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n \n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel\u2014\" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly \"\u2014 alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as\u2014if you'll excuse my use of the expression\u2014tariffs would.\"\n \n \n\n \n The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.\n \n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n \n \"The pictures in my history books\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did you use the word history ?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir.\"\n \n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n \n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble.\"\n \n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.\n \n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n \n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n\"It's July already\u2014about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away.\"\n \n \n\n \n A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.\n \n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas displays.\"\n \n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n \n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see\u2014\"\n \n \"Listen, could we\u2014\" Michael began.\n \n \"\u2014Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second\u2014\"\n \n \"By the way\u2014\"\n \n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n \n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed. If I might.\"\n \n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n \n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n \n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive.\"\n \n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n \n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history\u2014in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\n \n \n\n \n Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n\"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement....\"\n \n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n \n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station.\"\n \n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n\"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n \n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n \n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n \n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you\u2014it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a\u2014a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n \n \" Married! \" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your\u2014er\u2014friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?\"\n \n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n \n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n\"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you.\"\n \n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n \n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is.\"\n \n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n \n There was a short cold silence.\n \n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings\u2014you promise I won't hurt your feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.\n \n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n \n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are.\"\n \n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n \n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a\u2014er\u2014girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n \n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society.\"\n \n \"On Talitha\u2014\" Carpenter began.\n \n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\n \n \n\n \n A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n \n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n \n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n \n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.\n \n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n \n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n \n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization.\"\n \n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n \n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Michael and Mr. Carpenter?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30594, "query_start_index": 30596, "query_end_index": 30665, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr.Carpenter acts as a kind of companion and advisor to Micheal. They first meet on the space bus on the way to Port York. Carpenter notices that Micheal is hopelessly lost in the social intricacies of the United Universe. Carpenter decides to take Micheal under his wing to make sure that he doesn't get in any trouble with the law as he tries to maneuver his way through this new society. They exit the bus together and make their way to a nourishing station, and then into the old town, where Carpenter points out various landmarks to Micheal. Carpenter keeps having to correct Micheal on his language, and eventually has to defend and apologize for him when he offends a Meropian. Carpenter often is shocked by Micheal's language and thoughts, but chalks it up to him not being experienced. Carpenter eventually agrees that it's better for Micheal to go home to the Brotherhood. They part amicably. "}
{"id": "63605_1", "pid": "63605_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric North, a man from Earth, is lying on his stomach and thinking whether he should go down to the bottom of the canal before him, where the beauty of the fabled city of Mars calls the youth. After a short resistance, Eric surrenders to the call of the city, rushes towards it and starts beating the gate to get in. Upon hearing Eric's name, the sentinel screams it out loud and strikes the man with hatred, mentioning some kind of a legend. A crowd full of hatred gathers, but Eric manages to escape from the city. Nevertheless, it calls again and he starts pleading at the gates to be let back, even though he knows it's insane. Shortly after, Eric realizes, with the help of taking off his hat, that the beauty is an illusion and walks away on a safe distance. He figures out putting the hat on and off confuses the machine and the illusion disappears. He decides to destroy the city without exploring further not to put himself and his brother in danger. Nevertheless, turns out that Garve, the brother, followed his curiosity and went to the city. When the two meet, Garve takes off Eric's head and mentions the legend about Eric which everyone in the city believes. While heading to the city center, the two are followed and Garve asks his brother not to use the gun, which results in Eric's capture. Eric bluffs, threatening people with the prophecy, but they decide to kill him. A respected young woman, Nolette, suddenly saves him and brings before the council. There Eric learns the story of the city, which is a small colony of those who chose to remain on Mars during the drought and a machine was created there to translate thought into reality. Now people become lustful, lose their will to learn and many of those banished have lost their minds. That's why the city has to be destroyed and Eric is the instrument. Then Eric is led to his quarters in the building of the Elders, and his brother stays in the city as well, though in another place."}
{"id": "63605_1", "pid": "63605_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric North, from Earth, is trying to escape the illusion of a grand, but evil city on Mars. A machine buried deep under the city is controlling this facade, to make the city unspeakably beautiful, luring Eric in. He tries his best to avert his eyes from the city, but sweet music pours out of it, and he goes back, banging on the door to be let in. He wears a copper helmet, designed to shield him from the fabricated beauty of the place, but it doesn't seem to work. He is met by a sentinel guarding the city, who attacks him with a sword when he tells the guard his name. He exclaims that Eric is \"Eric the Bronze''. Eric wakes up with the people of the city crowding around him. They agree to execute him, but Eric is able to escape, making it back to his ship, where he expects to meet his brother Garve. He realises that if he continues to take the helmet he is wearing on and off, he can see past the illusion of the city, for what it truly is, and escapes it's pull. When he arrives on the ship, he sees a note from Garve, telling Eric that he heard the sweet music of the city, and has gone to explore it. Eric takes two grenades and his pistol, and goes to save Garve. He scales the outer wall of the city, soon meeting Garve. He steals the copper helmet away from Eric, throwing it over the wall. He tells Eric to keep his face hidden so the people of the city won't see him. He relays how the elders of the city told him the legend of Eric The Bronze, whom they are going to see now. They are soon spotted and taken by two men to the centre of the city, where the mob plan on killing him again. Just then, a woman on a black horse appears. Her name is Nolette, The Daughter of the City. She takes Eric to the building in which the elders preside. Eric enters the room where they are waiting. They Tell Eric of how the city came to be. How the once lush Mars died, and the city was created to protect those who keep the ancient skills and science of Mars. The city is really a machine under their feet, and it can be changed into whatever an inhabitant thinks of. However, over time, the people grew drunk with the power of creation and turned evil. And so, it is time for the city to be destroyed. And as the prophecy states, Eric will be the one to carry out the destruction. They invite him to stay in the city with his brother until this time comes, and if after a while it doesn't, and the prophecy is wrong, he is free to go. "}
{"id": "63605_1", "pid": "63605_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with Eric North, an Earth man, laying on the ground in the canal where he can see the spires and minarets in the distance. Those minarets and the city attracts him, but his mind fights this dangerous thought and reminds him the possibility of becoming a soulless husk. He refuses to look at it and walks away from the city. However, after reaching the bottom of the canal, he runs towards the city. As he gets nearer, he can hear richer music. The sentinel assumes that he is Eric the Bronze from the legend and hits Eric with his sword. The other people in the city also look at him with hatred and want to whip him. He gets so scared that he runs away. When he is attracted to come back again, he realizes that his metal helmet is able to defend the illusions for a short while. Thus, on his way back to his ship he keeps putting the helmet on and taking it off. He assumes that the helmet\u2019s electrical circuit is able to defend against the illusion for a while since it takes some time for the illusions to adjust the waves to affect him. Even though he seems very curious to learn more about the city, he decides to go back to the ship to his brother Grave North. \n\nOn the ship, Eric realizes that Grave had also heard the beautiful music from the city. While the music did not force Grave, his curiosity lead him to the city. Eric gets some explosives and goes back to the city. Climbing the city\u2019s wall, he is greeted by a caricature form of his brother. The caricature tells him to get rid of his hat as they walk to the city center where the Elders are expecting him. Realizing that they are being followed, they run separately. When Eric is finally captured, he remembers that his brother told him to not use the gun. Thus, he uses superstition and tells them that a Legend cannot be defeated with some simple whips. They decide to kill him instead. Before he is killed, Nolette, the Daughter of the City, carries him to the Council on a horse. There, he learns that Eric the Bronze will destroy this city. He also acknowledges that the city is a product of a machine that translates the mass will of the citizens into reality. From the Elders, he learns about the banished ones and the ancient Legend. Finally, he is then to stay inside this building for some time. If he is not Eric the Legend, then he will be able stay or leave as he desires. "}
{"id": "63605_1", "pid": "63605_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric North finds the fabled city of Mars and hears strange music that he cannot resist. Although he tries to turn away, the tune\u2019s influence becomes too powerful. He runs to the city\u2019s gates and demands to be let in. The gates swing open, and one of the well-dressed sentinels welcomes him. However, once he gives his name, the sentinel claims that he is Eric the Bronze and smashes his sword on Eric\u2019s metal hat. When Eric wakes up again, he finds many beautiful citizens staring at him with hatred. He fears what the citizens will do and runs out of the city, despite the music telling him to come back. For a moment, the illusion of the beautiful city changes to one of evil and disgust. Eric walks away from the canal and examines how the illusions have affected him. His helmet has an electrical circuit that acts as a shield against any electrical waves that may affect his brain. Although Eric wants to know more, it is too dangerous. He finds his brother Garve North and plans to make arrangements to have the city destroyed. When Eric returns, Garve tells him about seeing the city and is going down to see it again. He selects two grenades and a pistol packed with explosive pellets as he goes back to investigate with Garve. After he returns, the illusion changes once again when he has his hat on and after Garve throws his hat out of the city walls. Garve reveals that he knows about Eric the Bronze legend and is taking him to see the Elders right now. The two of them are being followed by the citizens, and Garve tries to distract them. They realize that Eric is who they want; Eric wants to use his gun, but Garve warns him not to if he values his brother\u2019s life. Instead, he tries to scare the citizens by bluffing, but they decide to kill him and stop the prophesy. Nolette, the Daughter of the City, suddenly appears and retrieves him from the angry crowd. She takes him to a building in the city center and tells him to go inside to see The Council. Six men and Nolette sit at a conference table, and they begin to discuss him. Nolette believes he is Eric the Bronze, while Kroon explains that he is prophesied to destroy the city. The city is also a machine built to protect the small colony of those on Mars after natural changes occurred. Kroon further explains that the Elders collectively control the city\u2019s appearance, and the ancient builders prophesied that the machine would be destroyed by a man termed Eric the Bronze. The name Eric was chosen because it is an honorable name for the ancient fathers and a symbol of new beginnings for some. The Elders let Eric live with them, while Garve will live outside of the building. "}
{"id": "63605_2", "pid": "63605_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Eric and the citizens?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23699, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric sees the citizens in the most beautiful way and is willing to join them. They, on the contrary, meet him with hatred as they hear his name. The citizens surround and try to attack Eric, they are superstitious and believe him to be the destroyer of the city from the legends. The Elders from the Council send one of them to save Eric. They also believe him to be part of the legend, but they know more about the city and the machine. They think that it's time for the city to be destroyed as it has changed, the machine doesn't do good anymore. Nolette, the daughter of the city, also believes Eric to be the legend and stops the crowd with the use of her authority from killing him. Eric is overwhelmed and he obeys the council, listening with curiosity. He also feels happiness near the girl. "}
{"id": "63605_2", "pid": "63605_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Eric and the citizens?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23699, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between Eric and the citizens of the fabricated city is a very strange, tense and violent one. The citizens believe that Eric is \"Eric the Bronze\" and man from Earth who is prophesied to destroy their city. Eric first meets a citizen at the gate to the city, when he mentions his name, the guard strikes him in the head with his sword. He is taken into the city by the guard, where the crowd debate on killing him. He is seen as a threat to their very existence. Later, when Eric returns to the city once again to rescue his brother Garve, is captured by two men, who take him to the centre of the city, also preparing to beat and kill him. He is only saved by Nolette, Daughter of the City, and the respect the citizens have for her. \n"}
{"id": "63605_2", "pid": "63605_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Eric and the citizens?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23699, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The first time he enters the city, the sentinel assumes that he is Eric the Bronze from the legend and hits Eric with a sword. The citizens stare at him with red hatred in their eyes once they learn that he is Eric the Bronze, here to destroy the city. The crowd are chanting for whips. Once he escapes the city, the gate closes right behind him. Later, when he enters the city again, he is taken prisoner by the citizens once more. They look at him coldly, calculatingly and are suggesting to whip him. However, once he speaks, they stand still and fear his words. However, a few seconds later, they decide to kill him at once so that he will not keep on coming back. Despite the hatred of the citizens, the Elders are quite friendly and they tell him about this city and the legend. They tell Eric to dwell in the building, assuring his safety. Once they find out that he is not Eric the Legend, he can choose to stay or go. "}
{"id": "63605_2", "pid": "63605_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Eric and the citizens?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23699, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is a one-sided hateful relationship between Eric and the citizens. When the sentinel first assumes that Eric is Eric the Bronze, there is a flame of blue hatred in his eyes. Even after he wakes up, all the beautiful citizens stare at him with red hate. They want ships to be brought into the city to scourge him from it and yell for whips. An older man even strikes him on the hat and back with a stick. On the other hand, Eric is confused by all of this because he initially has no idea of the prophesy until the Elders explain it. When he returns to the city again, the citizens conclude that they should kill Eric. One of the guards even prepares to slash his sword downward on Eric\u2019s neck until Nolette intervenes. "}
{"id": "63605_3", "pid": "63605_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kind of city Eric finds himself in?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23684, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The city is located on Mars. It was created a long time ago when Mars was flourishing. When most Martians left the planet because of the drought, a small colony remained in this place. Back then a machine, which is the whole city, was created to protect this small group. The machine translates thought into reality. It was used for the people in the city to receive all the necessary for life. At first, Eric considered it an illusion. The city captures thoughts with the use of a device and Eric's hat was an obstacle. Putting it on and off confused the machine and Eric was able to see the real ugliness of the city. When one gets into the radius of the machine, he is also called by it and can not refuse the city's beauty. When one doesn't look at the beautiful city, a voice still calls him. Many try to make their lustful desires real, they are banished for that and go mad. That's why the machine is not doing only good things anymore and should be destroyed in accordance with the prophecy. There is the council in the center of the city, whose Eldest know all about the origin of the machine. The members of the council, such as the daughter of the city, are respected by all the citizens. "}
{"id": "63605_3", "pid": "63605_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kind of city Eric finds himself in?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23684, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The city that Eric finds himself in is very strange, as it is not really a city at all. It is in fact, a machine buried underground. It was created so that the inhabitants that colonise this area could create whatever their hearts desired from the sand of the great deserts of mars. Beautiful music emanates out of it. The buildings of the city are towers that sparkle with jewels. In the centre of the city is a street covered in blue fur. All the people of the city seem to be more stunning than humanly possible. But the city is a lie. In truth, it holds ugliness and evil. It's inhabitants, while beautiful on the outside, are greedy, and drunk with power. \n"}
{"id": "63605_3", "pid": "63605_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kind of city Eric finds himself in?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23684, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric first has illusions of long streets of fur, jewels, wine, and fair women. When he gets to the city, he sees high walls surrounding the city and a gate carved with lotus blossoms. While the women in the city are beautiful, they stare at him with hatred. The city has wide fur streets going toward the center. The Elder\u2019s building is cubical. It is in direct contrast with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. In the conference room in the Elder\u2019s building, he learns that the city is very old. It dates back to when the canals has clear, green water and the deserts have plants. This city is the product of a machine that translates the mass will of the citizens into reality. He learns that the outward appearance of the city is maintained by the combined power of their imaginations. "}
{"id": "63605_3", "pid": "63605_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat kind of city Eric finds himself in?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23684, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric finds himself in a city that is actually a machine built to protect a small colony of the remaining inhabitants on Mars. The nature of the machine itself is to translate thought into reality, which is why the Elders can build and control its outward appearance. Many of the things in the city can be made from the machine by transmuting red dust in the desert to any desired material. The construction device of the machine then assembles the material into any pattern that has been recorded from one\u2019s thought. Even with the many beautiful citizens, including Garve, after they return the second time, it is all an illusion as part of the machine. "}
{"id": "63605_4", "pid": "63605_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23677, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins in in the desert on Mars, on the edge of a canal. In the bottom of the canal there is a fabulous city with the spires and minarets. Following the main character, the setting moves closer to the city, all the way through red dust everywhere around. The city is surrounded with a high wall and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. Inside the gate there is a sentinel with a sword and a crowd surrounds the character soon. He then escapes to the desert with its dust again and suddenly sees the city in an ugly way, the whole setting becomes disgusting and sordid. It keeps changing from beautiful to ugliness then while Eric goes away up the rocky sides of the canal to the desert. From there he moves to the ship. The ship is familiar to the character, though it's unlocked and empty. Eric returns to the city and starts going around the wall. Together with his brother he enters the city and heads to its center, the city seems beautiful and ugly at the same time while the helmet is still on Eric. Without it the city is more beautiful than ever. He follows his brother down a street of blue fur, then they ran from persecutors and Eric hid in a crevice between two buildings. from there some people captured Eric and moved to the center of the street.Then, Eric is saved by a girl and escapes on a horse. The setting moves to the door of the house of the Council and Eric enters. He goes into a large conference room through the hallway. There is a great T-table with six people sitting. "}
{"id": "63605_4", "pid": "63605_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23677, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Mars. Eric finds himself in a pit, where a beautiful, almost magical city lies. It is more stunning than imagination, with bejewelled towers and a soft, sweet music that spills out over the city walls. Outside of this city are the deserts of Mars, which were once lush, and divided by streams of green water. On the desert plane is Eric and his brother's ship. Inside the city again is the headquarters where the Elders sit. It is a functional, cubic building, which is described as just as beautiful as the rest of the buildings of the city, but in a rather different way. \n"}
{"id": "63605_4", "pid": "63605_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23677, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is a canal that is filled with red dust, and there are spires and minarets which twinkles in the distance. The side of the canal has small slopes and rough sandstones. The city is surrounded by high walls and the gate is carved with lotus blossoms. The city, without the illusions, becomes dull and sordid. It was filled with disgust and hatred. Eric\u2019s ship has a door that leads directly to the body of the ship. There is a control board where a note from Grave is clipped. Back at the city, the street is filled with blue fur. The crevice between two buildings is used for hiding, but soon Eric is taken down the fur road to the center. The city is filled with exquisite ornaments. On the other hand, the Elder\u2019s building is cubical and in direct contrast with the city. It seems as if it is from another time. The door of this building is also very plain. The pathway from the door leads to a conference room which has a great T-shaped table made of the same luminous plastic as the door. Beneath the building, there is a machine that translates the mass will of the citizens into reality. "}
{"id": "63605_4", "pid": "63605_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23677, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is first set outside of the city. Eric is near a canal in a desert on Mars. There is red dust being sifted by the winds and rough sandstone everywhere. Once he reaches the city, it is illusioned to have high walls and a gate with lotus blossoms carved into it. Eric also sees a long blue street from where the sentinel stands. Once he begins to beat the door, causing his hat to fall off, the city\u2019s appearance changes to one that has misshapen gargoyles of hatred as its spires and minarets. The previously beautiful music also changes to a song of hate. Eric\u2019s ship is briefly described as having locked doors and being armed enough to destroy the city. Once Nolette and Eric reach the city\u2019s center, the building is described as a monolith from another time. It is cubical and contrasts the rest of the city with its severe line and architecture. Even the door is plain and made out of luminous plastic, giving it a more timeless beauty. Down the hallway, there is a conference room with a T-shaped table made up of the same luminous plastic as the door. Beneath the building, caverns house the heart of the machine city. When Kroon mentions the past to Eric, he says that Mars once ran clear and green with water. Instead of deserts, there were vineyards and gardens. "}
{"id": "63605_5", "pid": "63605_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Garve leaving the ship and following the call of the city?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23730, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Eric is determined to destroy the city without exploring it, no matter how tempting it is. But Garve's note forces the eldest brother to follow and help his brother out. The whole course of events changes and Eric has to return to the city, which he left with such an effort. This leads to Eric being endangered, captured and almost killed. From another point, it leads to Eric learning more about the city and they legend. If he destroyed the city as he wanted to, he would fulfill the prophecy without knowing. He would have considered the whole city an illusion without knowing it was a machine initially created for a good purpose. His return to the city also leads to his encounter with the beautiful girl, whose presence makes Eric happy. "}
{"id": "63605_5", "pid": "63605_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Garve leaving the ship and following the call of the city?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23730, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Garve leaving the ship and following the call of the city is very significant to the plot. Before Eric realised that Garve had gone to the city, he was planning on destroying the place, with all of its inhabitants at once. Because Grave is missing, Eric must return to the city, where Garve has learned from the Elders about the legend of Eric the Bronze. Garve tries to take Eric to see the Elders, but Eric is captured by two civilians on the way. It is during this capture that Eric meets Nolette, who takes him to see the Elders. Because of Garve leaving the ship, the Elders are able to explain the history behind this mysterious city of Mars, and that he must be the one to destroy it. \n"}
{"id": "63605_5", "pid": "63605_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Garve leaving the ship and following the call of the city?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23730, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Garve\u2019s leaving serves as a reason and motive for Eric North to go back to the city. Knowing that Garve does not have a metal helmet nor does he has any weapons, Eric needs to go back to the city to bring Garve back. And because Eric goes back to the city, he is captured again, which leads to the next part of the story inside the Elder\u2019s building. If Garve did not leave for the city, Eric might not be captured, encounter Nolette, and learn about the city from the Elders. "}
{"id": "63605_5", "pid": "63605_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Beast-Jewel of Mars\n \n\n By V. E. THIESSEN\n \n \n The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend\u00e2\u20ac\u201da dire, hateful legend.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n \n One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.\n \n \n He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .\n \n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n \n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n \n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.\n \n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real.\"\n \n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.\n \n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.\n \n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n \n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n \n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n\"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n \n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n \n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric North!\"\n \n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\n \n \n\n \n When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n \n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n \n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n \n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n \n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\" and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n \n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the city.\"\n \n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n \n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.\n \n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.\n \n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.\n \n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.\n \n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n \n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.\n \n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n \n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n \n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n \n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\" wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n \n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal.\"\n \n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n \n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.\n \n \n\n \n The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n \n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric, you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n \n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n \n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n \n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n \n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n \n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n \n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n \n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n \n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n \n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n \n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n \n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.\n \n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n \n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value my life don't use the gun.\"\n \n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.\n \n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.\n \n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?\"\n \n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.\n \n \n\n \n Then one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n \n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!\"\n \n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.\n \n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.\n \n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n \n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n \n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\n \n \n\n \n She said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n\"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his muscles and began to pull.\n \n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.\n \n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.\n \n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.\n \n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n \n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n \n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n \n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n \n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n \n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is the judgment of the elders?\"\n \n \n\n \n Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?\"\n \n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n \n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?\"\n \n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things.\"\n \n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n \n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n \n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n \n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality.\"\n \n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n \n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n\"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n \n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.\n \n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n \n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n \n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n \n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here.\"\n \n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n \n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come.\"\n \n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n \n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return.\"\n \n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n \n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n \n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n \n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Garve leaving the ship and following the call of the city?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23632, "query_start_index": 23634, "query_end_index": 23730, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Garve leaving the ship and following the city's call sets up the second return to the city. Since Eric had initially planned to destroy the city, Garve's insistence on going back again prevents him from doing so. Furthermore, this second trip allows Eric to meet the Elders and not get killed by the citizens. Once he meets the Elders, he is more knowledgeable about the city's prophesy and story. It also sets up the purpose of Eric the Bronze and whether Eric North will fulfill it or not. However, this is also significant to Garve because he shows that he loves the city and wants to stay in it, directly contradicting what Eric is supposed to do to the city. \n\n"}
{"id": "62212_1", "pid": "62212_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27687, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is a gravely sick girl on a spaceship near Mars and the crew argues what to do. Roberds decides to pilot the ship to Earth breaking the command due to an emergency. Rat argues with him and wants to pilot the ship himself, which leads to him being forced to leave. Roberds and Peterson then explain to nurse Gray, who is looking after the sick girl, that Rat left his post once and therefore didn't warn anyone about the Sansan massacre, so now he is out of favor. The nurse, nevertheless, visits Rat in secret and asks to pilot the ship. She says the sick wants him to and Rat takes Judith, the sick girl covered in blankets, and the nurse to the hammocks on his wings. The girls then wait for him to return with another sick man who was injured after finding and saving the crashed girls in the past. Judith feels bad for breaking the law and causing so much trouble by leaving Earth, now her appendix hurts and they have to take charge of the ship and travel to a hospital on Earth. Rat returns with sick Gladney and learns that Judith and Patti Gray were attacked during their cruise to space, which is the reason they got to Mars. The trip begins, soon everyone gets thirsty and hot, Gray is hurt when the ship moves between a meteor rain, she is devastated with suffering. Rat refuses to brake and is going to make the trip in six days instead of eight. He then tells his part of the story about the Sansan massacre - he left the post to save a sick man but nobody believed it back then."}
{"id": "62212_1", "pid": "62212_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27687, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Roberds yelling that he is going to pilot the ship no matter the consequences. Roberds is saying that an ill girl needs to be taken to a hospital and that he plans to take her to Earth where she can be treated. He then asks Patti for the status of Judith and she communicates that Judith is holding in but will not be able to do so for long as her health continues to fail. \n\nSeparately, Rat and Greaseball are helping complete tasks to prepare the ship for its flight to Earth. Once they are done, Greaseball tells Rat that he can go to bed. As Rat is heading to his bed, Patti whispers to him through a window. She does not want to wait to fly to Earth and asks Rat to take them instead. Rat readily agrees to do so and begins to enact their escape plan. He flies both of the girls to the ship and instructs them to be quiet on the ship so they do not attract attention. Before they head off on their trip, Rat says he is going to get Gladney and bring him too as he is also sick. When Rat returns to the ship with Gladney, they are found out and the ship begins to be attacked. One of Rat\u2019s wings is damaged in the process. Rat pilots the ship to a very fast takeoff and they head towards Earth. At the beginning of the trip, Rat finds out that Judith is ill because of her appendix. \n\nPatti continues talking to Rat and answering questions about herself and Judith. During the conversation with Rat, she begins to realize the trip is going to be very uncomfortable as the cooling system is not working and they have a very limited supply of water. Patti becomes dehydrated and grows increasingly upset about the conditions on the cramped ship. In exasperation, she repeatedly asks him how many more days they have to spend on the ship. \n\nGladney suddenly wakes up and in an excited manner tells Rat that he needs to begin braking. Gladney begins asking Patti for help in convincing Rat to apply the brakes to make sure they get to Earth safely. Rat explains that he is cutting the trip time down from an expected 78 days to just 6 days with no breaks. Suddenly, they spot Earth in the distance. Patti starts to ask Rat about the attack that the Chief mentioned earlier and Rat says that he was just trying to help someone but knew no one would listen to his story. Gladney interrupts the conversation and taunts Rat that he will be arrested when they get to Earth to the dismay of Patti. Rat replies by cryptically stating that Earth seems like a nice place but not one for him. \n"}
{"id": "62212_1", "pid": "62212_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27687, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gladney and Judith are two ill patients who require surgery on Earth. A Centaurian named Rat asks the Chief Consul Roberds if he can pilot the ship, but the field manager angrily denies him the opportunity. He asks Peterson to help get rid of Rat, and Rat leaves quickly. Roberds is determined to take the ship for himself because both patients will get the necessary treatment, and he mentions that Greaseball has stayed up all night, tearing the bunks and lockers out to prepare. Nurse Gray comes back after checking on the patient, and he tells her that she will be sleeping in a hammock for their eight-day trip. Gray asks about Rat, to which Peterson explains that he was part of the Sansan massacre. Rat was a member of the outpost watch, but he went AWOL from the Ganymedean colony when Mad Barry Sansan attacked and was saved by politics. Gray tells Roberds to call her if needed and then leaves the room. The story cuts to Rat helping Greaseball fill the water tanks with fuel and check the concentrated rations. Just as Rat is about to go to bed, Nurse Gray gets his attention and tells him that her patient wants him to pilot the ship. He instructs the nurse to wrap Judith up and takes them to the ship by flying. After dropping both of them inside, Rat leaves to transport Gladney. Judith laments about having learned her lesson the hard way and notices that the pilot has been gone for a long time. Just then, Rat returns with Gladney after tricking Roberds and Peterson by burning down his shack. Rat then takes off with the ship. They get thirsty from the heat, but there is only one water tank because the rest is full of fuel. The water they drink is hot because the ship itself is heating up. Gray realizes that the hammocks have also turned upside down. The ship is hell as the journey continues because of the uncomfortable conditions, lack of sleep, and increasing heat. However, Rat continues to drive the ship. Even when Nurse Gray continuously asks him how long the trip is and breaks down, he makes her get up. Gladney wants Rat to brake too, but he refuses and explains that this is a six-day journey. He also says that they will land tonight. Nurse Gray asks him about his knowledge of the attack in the Sansan massacre; Rat responds that he left his post to help a sick man in the desert when the attack happened. Gladney tells him that the police will get him the moment they land, while Rat only grins and says that Earth is not a place for Rat. Gladney realizes what he implies, but Rat tells him to shut up because he talks too much. "}
{"id": "62212_1", "pid": "62212_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27687, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story opens on Mars, with Chief Roberds and Peterson speaking to Rat, a Centaurian. Peterson refuses to allow Rat to pilot an emergency surface ship to Earth after several people have fallen sick due to a space illness. The two argue briefly, before Rat storms out. As Peterson and the Chief discuss the fate of the ship, and advise that Roberds pilot the ship despite it possibly costing him his job, nurse Patti Gray appears in the doorway. She tells them that her patient, seventeen year old Judith, is falling ill quickly and asks when the trip was planned to take place. She also asks about Rat, and it is revealed that he has a record due to his role in the Sansan massacre, where he abandoned his post, causing destruction to their colony. Roberds plans to take off at dawn. However, that night, Patti finds Rat and asks him to pilot the ship; Judith requested him specifically and they fear waiting until dawn. Rat agrees, and carries them to the ship using his wings. He additionally brings Gladney along, who is also sick. As the ship prepares to take off, they are suddenly attacked with bullets. Rat is injured slightly but they manage to get away. On the ship, Rat asks Patti what is wrong with Judith, and she replies saying that she has appendicitis; Rat remarks that Centaurians do not have an appendix. There are challenges on the ship, namely the temperature and the lack of water supply; Patti and Rat are only allowed two drinks a day, and the water remains hot. As time passes, the crew begins to go mad, and Gladney erupts in rage, telling Rat to begin braking the ship. Rat reveals that they had long since passed the halfway mark, and he does not intend to brake. Gladney angrily tells Rat that the police will be waiting for him on Earth."}
{"id": "62212_2", "pid": "62212_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Judith and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27712, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti Gray is Judith's nurse, governess, guard and everything of that kind. Judith is only seventeen and they are pretty close with Patti. The least watches over the sick, reports her condition and fulfills the girl's request like asking Rat to pilot the ship. Judith relies on her nurse, she calls for her when in pain and tells her how sorry she is for causing trouble. Judith's call makes Patti get up even when she herself is in pain. She is anxious for the girl not making it to the hospital. The two stick together as they crashed together after an attack on their spaceship and have to return to Earth together. "}
{"id": "62212_2", "pid": "62212_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Judith and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27712, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti is implied to have a caring role over Judith, such as a governess that can also be seen as a nurse or protector. Patti is helping take care of Judith as she is currently ill. She worries a great deal about Judith\u2019s health and is doing everything possible to try to get her to help faster. They were previously on a ship together but it crashed. The trip was meant to be a vacation trip and the cruiser ship was owned by Judith\u2019s father. Patti takes on a caring role for Judith as she tries to reassure her that the decision they made to leave early has been done. "}
{"id": "62212_2", "pid": "62212_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Judith and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27712, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Judith and Patti Gray share a caring relationship. Patti Gray is a combination guard, nurse, and governess to the seventeen year old girl. Nurse Gray cares for Judith for most of the trip and constantly checks up on her to make sure her condition is not worse than it already is. The two of them are very close as well. When Judith feels guilty about the foolish stunt she causes and the consequences she faces, Gray tells her that it is not her fault because others have also experienced the same. Even though she could have chosen to stay until Roberds piloted the ship, she agreed to ask Rat to pilot the ship because of Judith\u2019s choice of which pilot she wants to fly her. This action shows that she is very considerate of Judith\u2019s opinions and wants."}
{"id": "62212_2", "pid": "62212_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Judith and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27712, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti Gray is a maternal figure of sorts to Judith. She accompanies her on her trip to Mars, and when Judith becomes ill, Patti becomes her caretaker, aided by her nursing skills. Patti Gray looks after Judith, staying by her side throughout the night and then joining her on the ship when Rat comes to retrieve them. Judith is young, only seventeen, and because of this looks to Patti when she is ill, calling for her several times on the ship."}
{"id": "62212_3", "pid": "62212_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Rat and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "From the very beginning Patti is keen one Rat. When their gazes first meet she almost smiles back. She has to hide her goodwill as Rat is despised by the crew of the ship. The nurse is interested in his background and asks Roberds and Peterson. After learning about him leaving the post she wonders why he wasn't executed and feel sympathy for Rat. She visits him in secret to ask to pilot the ship, because her and the sick girl need to get to Earth as fast as possible and believe he can help. Rat does everything in a fast and well-organized way and plans to reach Earth in six days without brakes. He instructs Patti to cover herself in blankets not to get too hot and decides how the water will be distributed. He also tells about trying to save a man being the reason for him leaving the post and Patti feels even more sympathy. Nevertheless, during the journey they have a fight when she starts panicking and demanding water and Rat beats her. He tries to enforce his rules on the ship and others ask him to brake, Patti hurts herself during Rat's manoeuvres between the meteorites but she stands it. "}
{"id": "62212_3", "pid": "62212_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Rat and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rat and Patti Gray first meet when Rat is being yelled at by Roberds. They exchange short glances and small smiles during this initial meeting. Patti asks for Rat\u2019s help to get to Earth quicker instead of waiting for Roberds to take them. Rat agrees to help them readily accepts the request, quickly putting into action an escape plan. When Patti wakes up on the ship after the abrupt take off, she and Rat have a friendly conversation. Rat continuously smiles throughout the conversation and appears to be very friendly and happy to help Judith. "}
{"id": "62212_3", "pid": "62212_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Rat and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti Gray is initially curious about Rat, prompting her to ask Roberds about his past. Once she asks Rat to pilot the ship, she is hesitant of him as a pilot. The two of them eventually converse once the ship takes off. They discuss the illness that Gladney and Judith are suffering from. She is curious about Rat's name, but he does not tell her because it is too long. He is also helpful, instructing Gray to keep the wool blanket on to preserve body heat and keep out the cold. Even when she swings a boot at him, he takes her to the water faucet and explains why the water is so hot. However, despite being helpful, Rat is quite rough towards Gray too. When she rolls along the deck and has a breakdown about not being able to keep up, he throws a handful of water into her face. He then kicks her to get up too. When he points out Earth to them, she is extremely grateful towards him for getting them to the planet so fast. Rat and Patti Gray do not share a very personal relationship. However, she learns more about him throughout their trip, and the two of them support each other in their own ways. \n"}
{"id": "62212_3", "pid": "62212_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Rat and Patti Gray?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti Gray is wary of Rat and his history. She first asks Roberds and the Chief about Rat's name, and learns the story of Rat and his betrayal during the Sansan massacre. Despite being aware of this, Patti still reaches out to Rat and asks him to pilot the ship to Earth, at the request of Judith. Patti, being unknowledgeable of piloting ships, must listen to Rat's orders reluctantly. However, she still asks him about his life and eventually his side of the story at the massacre. Patti Gray becomes increasingly frustrated with Rat due to the conditions on the ship, particularly with the water supply. She maintains a respectful relationship with Rat despite her suspicions remaining."}
{"id": "62212_4", "pid": "62212_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the crashing of the ship of Judith's father?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27727, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The crashing of the ship brings Judith and Patti to Mars where they meet two miners and then the whole crew of the spaceship including Rat. Judith wouldn't get that sick and lose the means to return to Earth if the ship didn't crash. The miners wouldn't suffer after helping the girls. Therefore, Judith wouldn't learn the lesson of breaking the law and leaving Earth.  The crashing also leads to the necessity of Rat piloting the ship and all the party suffering from heat and thirst. The whole situation of danger and limitless occurs because the ship crashed and the girl gets sick on Mars, so she needs to get to Earth immediately. "}
{"id": "62212_4", "pid": "62212_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the crashing of the ship of Judith's father?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27727, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The ship crashed because Judith was piloting the ship and began to experience the symptoms of her appendicitis. It is unknown whether Judith\u2019s father survived the crash. It is implied that the man that Rat helped in the desert is perhaps Judith\u2019s father. Rat helping that man is what caused him to be declared AWOL and why he might have authorities after him for his failure to report to duty. If the ship had not crashed then Judith\u2019s father would not have been alone and injured in the desert, and Rat would not have been AWOL trying to help the man. "}
{"id": "62212_4", "pid": "62212_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the crashing of the ship of Judith's father?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27727, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The crashing of the ship of Judith\u2019s father is what sets up the story. Nurse Gray explains that Judith took her father\u2019s cruiser as a pleasure jaunt and came over. Although the ship is supposed to be large and easy to handle, the journey ended after Judith lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The ship's crashing is what leads her to be on Mars, and it is also the cause of her illness because she has not gone through the same mill that the men who live and work there have gone through. This past event also sets up the current events of Rat speed-driving the ship back to Earth to save her life. "}
{"id": "62212_4", "pid": "62212_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the crashing of the ship of Judith's father?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27727, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Judith's father's ship crashing leaves Judith and Patti Gray stranded on Mars. She initially wanted to recklessly travel to Mars, Gray coming along with her, and used her father's ship because it was easy to navigate. However, she was soon attacked by space-appendicitis and lost control of the ship, causing it to crash. This is significant because Judith and Patti Gray no longer have a way home, with Judith's illness becoming worse. They are desperate to return to Earth and thus resort to taking the ship with Rat as their pilot. "}
{"id": "62212_5", "pid": "62212_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Patti Gray throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with Patti looking after the sick girl. She hears the dispute of the crew about the future steps and gets involved. She learns out about Rat's past and the mistake of leaving his post which led to a massacre. Nevertheless, she and the girl decide to ask him to pilot the ship, hoping it will help the sick get on Earth in time. Patti gets sympathetic towards Rat from the beginning and keeps trying to talk to him. She keeps being by Judith. Rat bring her to the hammocks on his wings and she is frightened for a second. She follows his orders and advices until her suffering gets intense. During the trip with Rat as a pilot she has to drink only twice a day to keep water and she feels extremely thirsty. She also hurts herself when the ship suddenly moves from one side to another. Water tastes like fuel to her and she gets mad at Rat for not naming the amount of days. Then she learns about Rat's point of view on the past situation with the massacre and becomes even more sympathetic towards him. "}
{"id": "62212_5", "pid": "62212_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Patti Gray throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti Gray is in a room listening to an argument when she hears Judith moaning from a different room and goes to tend to her aid. After attending to Judith she goes back to talk to Roberds. She informs Patti that Rat went AWOL during a very important battle. The Chief Consul explains that unrelated politics is what saved Rat from execution for abandoning his post. After her inquiry about Rat, Patti says goodnight to everyone and returns to her room for the night. Patti secretly converses with Rat and asks him to fly Judith and her to Earth right away instead of waiting for Roberds. Rat agrees to do so and flies Judith to the ship. After Rat grabs and takes Judith to the ship, Patti anxiously awaits for him to return. He eventually returns and flies her to the ship too. When they get to the ship Patti reassures Judith that there is no use in mulling over the decision to take the ship now and tries to calm her down. \n\nBecause Rat pilots the ship to a very fast takeoff, Patti, Judith, and Gladney pass out due to the forces. Patti eventually wakes up and is surprised to find out how long she was out, she then begins to talk to Rat. During the trip, Patti becomes thirsty because of the very limited supply of water and she becomes irritated when Rat tells her she cannot drink more water. She grows increasingly upset about the conditions on the ship. When informed by Gladney that Rat is traveling at an excessive speed without necessary breaking, Patti tells Rat that he needs to explain how he is going to deaccelerate. She\u2019s interrupted when they suddenly spot Earth. She goes to get Rat water as requested but returns to tell him that there is no more water left. \n"}
{"id": "62212_5", "pid": "62212_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Patti Gray throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the story, Patti Gray is forced to endure many of the harsh conditions on the ship while having to take care of her patients. She initially mentions that she was once part of the Fleet and is used to harsh conditions. However, Nurse Gray is also never able to sleep more than three hours due to her patients and having to constantly check up on their conditions whenever they are in pain. Although Nurse Gray is determined and confident to see Judith get better, there are also parts where she begins to lose her sanity. She is upset that there is only one tank of boiling hot water and the difficulty of getting into a hammock in space. Later, as their journey reaches the end, Nurse Gray begins to go mad from the horrid conditions on the ship and falls face-first onto the floor. Once the end is near, and with some support from Rat, she is extremely happy to see Earth again. Nurse Gray is also able to calm down and resume asking Rat questions. "}
{"id": "62212_5", "pid": "62212_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRISON PLANET\n \n\n By BOB TUCKER\n \n \n To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape\u2014with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n\"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n \n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n \n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n \n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n \n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.\n \n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n \n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\n \n \n\n \n When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.\n \n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n \n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n \n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n \n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n \n The nurse came out of the door.\n \n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n \n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n \n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n \n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?\"\n \n \"Eight days, in that ship.\"\n \n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.\n \n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n \n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n \n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?\"\n \n Peterson opened his mouth.\n \n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n \n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n \n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n \n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n \n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n \n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n \n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n \n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n \n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson.\"\n \n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right.\"\n \n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n \n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n \n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!\"\n \n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n \n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\n \n \n\n \n Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n \n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n \n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n \n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n \n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n \n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.\n \n \"Yes?\"\u2014in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n \n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n \n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.\n \n \"Well, can you?\" she demanded.\n \n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n \n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n \n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n \n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?\"\n \n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n \n \"When?\" he whispered.\n \n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.\n \n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold\u2014hot too. Wrap good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.\n \n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n \n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.\n \n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.\n \n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back soon....\" and he was gone.\n \n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\n \n \n\n \n Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n \n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n \n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n \n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n\"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.\n \n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n \n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n \n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n \n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n \n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n \n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n \n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you.\"\n \n \n\n \n The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.\n \n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n\"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law.\"\n \n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home.\"\n \n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n \n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n \n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n \n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n \n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.\n \n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n \n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n \n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n \n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.\n \n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n \n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n \n \" Fan him? I don't understand.\"\n \n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.\n \n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n \n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.\n \n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n \n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n \n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n \n \n\n \n \"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.\n \n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n \n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest strap was lying loose at his side.\n \n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.\n \n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.\n \n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n \n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter\u2014?\" pointing.\n \n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n \n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n \n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n \n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?\"\n \n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n \n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n \n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n \n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n \n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n \n \"So you?\"\n \n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work.\" She shivered.\n \n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n \n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.\n \n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n \n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n \n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n \n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.\n \n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n \n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front name?\"\n \n \"Patti.\"\n \n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n \n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n \n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n \n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n \n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n \n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n \n He faced about. \"For her\u2014\" nodding to Judith, \"and him\u2014\" to Gladney,\n\"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You, me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\n \n \n\n \n They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n \n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n \n Rat stared at her without answer.\n \n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n \n \"Heard you.\"\n \n \"Well...?\"\n \n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n \n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n \n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n \n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n \n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n \n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.\n \n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n \n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.\n \n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n \n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.\n \n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n \n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa\u2014\" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.\n \n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.\n \n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n \n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n \n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.\n \n \"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\n \n \n\n \n Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.\n \n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n \n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n \n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n \n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n \n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.\n \n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.\n \n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n \n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.\n \n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n \n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.\n \n \n\n \n Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.\n \n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?\"\n \n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You sick.\"\n \n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n \n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n \n \" Not brake? \" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make him!\"\n \n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this half-way line?\"\n \n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n \n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n \n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n \n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n\"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n \n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n \n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he\u2014\"\n \n \"\u2014he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n\"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n \n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!\"\n \n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n \n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n \n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n \n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n \n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.\n \n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.\n \n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n \n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n \n \"Just name it!\"\n \n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n \n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n \n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n \n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at her.\n \n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n \n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?\"\n \n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n \n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n \n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n \n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship.\"\n \n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's done now.\"\n \n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n \n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n \n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're\u2014\"\n \n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Patti Gray throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27645, "query_start_index": 27647, "query_end_index": 27705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Patti Gray is a nurse to Judith on Mars. She updates Peterson and the Chief on Judith's status, and asks them about Rat and why he is not allowed to pilot the ship to Earth. Patti learns that Rat was involved in treason back when the Sansan massacre happened. Later that night, Patti finds Rat and asks him to pilot the ship to Earth as soon as possible. Rat later retrieves Judith and Patti and takes them aboard the ship, where they take off. Rat and Patti talk on the ship, asking each other questions, and Patti faces several hardships on the ship, including the lack of water and the uncomfortable temperature. As the journey continues, it becomes unbearable for Patti."}
{"id": "51268_1", "pid": "51268_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30747, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with Karl Allen, a Second System colonist, and Joe dragging their raft from the water, hoping that they will make it in time to put their names on the list. Later we learned that the list is used to pair up the females that are coming to their colony \u2013 planet \u2013 as husbands and wives. After Karl and Joe Hill finish, they still have about two hours left before the rocket lands at Landing City. On their way towards the Landing City, Karl caught himself wondering about the trip back with a girl whom he will be paired with. Apparently, they have never seen an Earthwoman, but tales seems to cherish them as hardworking and beautiful. The speaker announces that it\u2019s time to draw their numbers. Karl draws 53. Later, Joe and Karl agrees to meet later to see if they want to trade the girls that has their numbers. \n\nMacDonald and Claude Escher meet to discuss matters regarding the ratios between male and female at the colonies. Currently, there are not as many females on the colonized planets. From the beginning of the colonization, there were more adventuresome males than females, they headed for the new world but most of the females stayed behind. Thus, there are five females for every three males on Earth, while the colonies have more males. Thus those girls needs to be brought from their original planet, in this case the Earth, to colonies for those males there. Another problem, states MacDonald, is the number of men applying for emigration to colonized planets have been dropping. MacDonald considers this reasonable since it seems illogical for a male to move away from a place that has more females than males. Escher then disregards the qualification for colonization and decides to focus on making the people that don\u2019t want to colonize to colonize, whether it is through convincing or forcing. \n\nPhyllis Hanson is a thirty years old woman who desires a husband. The government\u2019s supplement offering cannot replace a husband and family. Then in her mail today, she gets a poster that tells her to come to the colonies. Though she admires the man on the poster, she thought the poster is a violation of privacy. Then we see Ruby Johnson stealing a beautiful gown from the store and then getting caught. Ruby thinks that she will simply face a small fine along with a few weeks or months in detention and that\u2019s it. She seems to have shoplifted many times that she even knows the information that the officers want. However, to her surprised, she will be charged with a 10,000 dollar fine along with ten years in prison, or she can choose to go to a colony planet and get a five-hundred-dollar bonus. She was shocked, but chooses the latter. Similarly, Suzanne is given a similar choice between shipping out to the colony or going to jail. She also chooses the colony planet. "}
{"id": "51268_1", "pid": "51268_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30747, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Karl Allen and Joseph Hill are doing hard work on a boat and complaining about the lack of help they are receiving. After finishing her work, Karl begins to walk along a trail and thinks about the wife draft. They continue along the trail towards Landing City where they have to walk through varying crowds and navigate the muddy streets of the city. Karl and Joseph eventually see a crowd of people in front of the rocket port office and go to inspect what is causing the commotion. The familiar poster shows a beautiful woman from Earth being advertised on the poster. They hear an announcement and follow its instructions to assemble in a line with their numbers for the wife draft. \n\nThe story switches to MacDonald and Claude Escher. MacDonald enters Escher\u2019s office and tells Escher that the departure of men from Earth to the different colonized planets has caused the ratio of women to be much higher than men, causing various issues on Earth. Escher thinks of a plan and decides that the strict qualifications for travels and need to be financially stable need to be removed. He considers using immoral methods as a solution to convince women to colonize other planets. \n\nThe story focuses on Phyliss Hanson. Phyllis finishes her job and heads to her home. She acknowledges to herself that she is not attractive while she looks at her reflection. She grows frustrated as she is 30 and longs to have a husband but she has no prospects. She receives a letter in the mail that presents an opportunity for her to solve her problem. She mails a reply to the return address in hopes of being matched with a husband. \n\nThe story then takes a look at Ruby Johnson. She sees an absolutely gorgeous gown in a store and enacts a plan to steal it. She is immediately caught by security when she steals it. She goes through the motions of the court which she has previous experience with doing. She expects a light sentence. The judge then informs her that she has 2 choices for her sentence: emigrate to a colony planet or go to jail for 10 years with a hefty fine attached. This is an example of the immoral method Escher is enacting. While shocked, she recognizes she is being played and agrees to go to a colony planet. \n\nSuzanne is the next woman-focused upon in the story. While admiring her apartment, she gets a call. Prompted by the call, she finishes getting dressed and leaves. She walks into a brownstone after being greeted by a young man. She is surprised and unhappy to see a group of women she recognizes sitting in a room. She sits down as instructed and the man addresses the room. The man presents a similar choice as the judge did to Ruby Johnson. When asked by the man, Suzanne tries to wittingly reply that she loves to travel, indicating she chooses to emigrate. \n"}
{"id": "51268_1", "pid": "51268_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30747, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Karl Allen and Joseph Hill are working with parampa logs by heaving them up the river. They discuss how much time is left before they go to Landing City and register for a number on the list. They start talking about the possibilities with their future wives, including raising a family and taking care of a garden. None of them have ever met an Earthwoman, but there are many stories about the pretty women. Once in Landing City, they go to the rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet. Karl draws the number 53 and gets a few pamphlets with helpful information. He gets a sandwich and Pop from a boy before wandering back to the main field to wait for the rocket as it arrives. The story cuts to a conversation between Claude Escher and Mr. MacDonald. They discuss the growing ratio between women and men. Women are now turning to more petty crime because they believe it will help them catch a husband on Earth. They discuss more problems, especially how women do not want to colonize and men do not want to emigrate to the colonies. Once MacDonald leaves, Escher goes through the rules set up by the Board and tries to think of a better solution. The story then cuts to Phyllis Hansen, who goes to the washroom to clean up after a day at work. She then heads home and is worried about not finding a husband. There are alternatives to spending her evenings, such as bridge, gossiping, or a similar organization to fill the void. As she goes through the mail, Phyllis receives a poster advertising for women to go to the colonies to find a husband. She is offended and believes it is a violation of privacy. However, later, she writes a letter to the address on the poster. After, the story cuts to Ruby Johnson stealing a dress from a shop. She believes that the coast is clear but is caught by a detective. The male judge at the detention center asks why she stole it, but she refuses to tell him. Ruby gives out her statistics to the judge; he tells her that she can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a ten thousand dollar fine or go to one of the colonies for a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus. Ruby agrees to be shipped out. The final woman is Suzanne Carstens, who rents her apartment by tricking her old landlady into believing she works as a buyer in one of the downtown stores. She receives a call and goes to the address promptly. Once she steps inside, she realizes that most of the women sitting in the chairs in the building are ones that she recognizes. Suzanne tries to explain herself, but even her name is fake. However, she is offered to be shipped out to the colonies for security or to face jail time. With no choice, she accepts the offer. \n"}
{"id": "51268_1", "pid": "51268_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30747, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes place in multiple facets of the same storyline. In the first part of the story, we meet Karl Allen and Joseph Hill, who are on one of the planets that have been colonised by Earth. They are waiting for the arrival of a shipment of women from Earth, who will become their future brides. There are more men in the colonies than there are women, and so the government has sent these shipments of women from Earth to marry these men. \nIn the second part of the story, Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Escher of the colonisation board try to come up with a plan on how to convince women to leave Earth, to go and live on these worlds that are just beginning to become civilised, and marry men they've never met. They eventually come up with the idea that the method they use to entrap these women into their plan does not have to be technically all that moral, and they may be able to cross a legal grey area. \nIn the third part of the story, Phyllis Hanson, a woman of Earth, returns home from work. She is in her thirties, and probably destined to be alone and unmarried for the rest of her life at this stage. That is until she receives a poster from an unknown source, with a picture of a strapping man, telling her to \"come to the colonies, the planets of romance\". She sends a letter to the address at the bottom of the poster. \nRuby Johnson is caught stealing a dress from a department store. At her criminal hearing, a judge sentences her to either ten years in prison, with a ten thousand dollar fine to work off, or a chance to go to the colonies, and get a five hundred dollar bonus. \nSuzanne Carstens leaves her gorgeous apartment one night to  meet a blind date (or a John) it seems. She goes to an address that looks like an office building, where a young man greets her. She is taken into a room where she is held, along with many other women. They are all given the same ultimatum as Ruby Johnson. \nTHE END."}
{"id": "51268_2", "pid": "51268_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the different expectations about women\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30764, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "First, Joe takes some furs that could help cover the girl, and Joe hopes that she will appreciate it. However, Hill believes that they should give less to the girls. Because the less you give, the less they will expect, and if they are spoiled, the men has to do all the farming and family raising yourself, which is all that they have to do. Joe thought of the girl as somebody he can talk to, somebody that can help him with the farm. Hill suggests for his wife to have a garden, but Karl doesn\u2019t think she will have the time for a garden. However, it is important to note that the girls were considered as objects since Karl and Joe mentions trading them. In particular, Earthwomen are expected to be beautiful, sophisticated, glamorous, and hardworking. Moreover, Escher is thinking about persuading and forcing the girls to colonize while forgetting about the moral codes. The governments seems to expect the women without husbands to be satisfied with bridge games and benefits and lectures. "}
{"id": "51268_2", "pid": "51268_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the different expectations about women\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30764, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The few women that were on the colonized planet where Karl and Joseph lived were expected to cook the food that was being served as part of the welcoming party for the wife draft. On Earth, the expectations for women are to find a husband. Phyliss is 30 years old and details her frustration with not being married at her age, complaining that nothing else can fill the emptiness that she feels from not having a husband. "}
{"id": "51268_2", "pid": "51268_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the different expectations about women\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30764, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the story, the women are expected to find husbands. This is especially apparent on Earth, where locking down a man has become an intense competition because of the five to three ratio between women and men. Furthermore, the Earthwomen are expected to be more sophisticated, cultured, prettier, and glamorous than the colonial women. These women are also expected to fulfill the traditional roles of raising families, helping colonize the planet, and supporting their husbands with whatever they need help with. The decision to send the women to the colonies is also made by men. On the other hand, women are expected to just follow along and accept the offer if they want any chance of landing a husband at all. \n"}
{"id": "51268_2", "pid": "51268_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the different expectations about women\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30764, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There are many expectations for women both on the colonised worlds, and on Earth. On Earth, women are expected to behave in a polite, civilised manner. They are also lucky to get a man of any kind, with women outnumbering men 5 to 3, so they are expected to take what they can get. Women on the colonised worlds are expected to obey their husbands, and take care of all tasks related to life on their farms. This includes: working the farms, and raising the families. \n"}
{"id": "51268_3", "pid": "51268_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some odd things that happened in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30769, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Phyllis Hanson has been wanting a husband and a family for almost three years. She does not think that the bridge games and benefits and lectures can replace a husband and family. However, in her mail today, she gets a poster that tells her to come to the colonies. This is clearly a violation of her privacy. However, the man on the poster is very handsome, and she looks at it again and again. Though she admires the man on the poster, she still writes a letter reporting it. Then Ruby Johnson also goes through something strange. She steals a beautiful gown from the store and then gets caught. She knows that she will simply face a small fine along with a few weeks or months in detention because she was caught stealing dress from the . However, to her surprised, she is told that she be charged with a 10,000 dollar fine along with ten years in prison, or she can choose to go to a colony planet and get a five-hundred-dollar bonus. She is shocked, but chooses the latter. Similarly, Suzanne is given a similar choice between shipping out to the colony or going to jail after receiving a phone call telling her to get to a specific place. She also chooses the colony planet. "}
{"id": "51268_3", "pid": "51268_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some odd things that happened in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30769, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "MacDonald notes that because of the higher population of women on Earth than men, a lot stricter laws have been enacted. An example includes a prohibition of alcohol from being used in everyday items such as cough medicines and hair tonics. In addition, there are laws against violating a women\u2019s privacy and a purity related moral code. An example of a privacy violation is when a woman asks Phyllis Hanson about her plans for the night. "}
{"id": "51268_3", "pid": "51268_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some odd things that happened in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30769, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the odd things that happen in the story is the whole process of pairing up a husband and wife. The system is based on numbers as first impressions; although this seems to be an efficient way, Karl notices that there is almost no time for him and his future wife to get acquainted with one another. This is rather odd because many of them want to marry for love, yet the system caters to an arranged marriage rather than a natural relationship. Hill even brings up trading women if they are not satisfied with who they get.\n\nAnother odd occurrence in the story is how both men and women do not want to emigrate to the colonies. There are clearly more men in the colonies, yet many choose to stay on Earth because more women are there. None of the women want to go either; if they decide to leave Earth to colonize, it will be the same as giving up their luxurious, modern civilization to fight disease. \n"}
{"id": "51268_3", "pid": "51268_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some odd things that happened in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30769, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There are many odd things that happen in the story. The story itself is quite odd in form. It jumps from different times in one linear storyline, beginning at the end, and ending towards the beginning. It is also quite odd that the two men on the colonised planet think that women should be subservient, and that if you start to treat a woman with kindness and respect, and not as a servant, she will end up being spoiled. Another interesting part of the story is the nondescript place which Suzanne Carstens walks to. We are not really informed as to whether or not Ms Carstens is a prostitute, although it is insinuated. \n"}
{"id": "51268_4", "pid": "51268_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30750, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story first sets next to the river on Midplanet. The road connecting the river to the Landing City goes from forest to grassland, multiple small trails connects to the large one, leading towards the city. The Landing City is not really that big, especially comparing to Altair. The battered shack and headquarters building appears as they reach the Landing City. There is a grassy lot next to the landing field. The landing field is decorated with bunting and welcome signs. There is a table with government pamphlets as well as tables for luncheon food. \n\nInside Mr. Eescher\u2019s room, there is an intercom switch, some seats, and on his desk, there was also a drawer. Phyllis\u2019 in an office that has a typewriter which is put inside a drawer. There is a washroom along with a mirror where she notices her worry lines. She owns a small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, in the bathroom there\u2019s a mirror. She is on the sofa reading a book when she throws it across the room. There\u2019s also a mail slot where she finds the odd poster. Rudy is in shop, and there\u2019s a dress laying on the counter. In a courtroom in the detention building, there\u2019s a judge and he has a ledger with him. Suzanne\u2019s apartment has needle shower with perfume dispenser, build-in soft-drink bar in the library, as well as all-communications set and electrical massager. There is also a telephone, and her bedroom has a hat box. She arrives at a brownstone office building, there\u2019s a buzzer and a then a young man appears in the doorway. There are bright lights inside the room, and there was a battery of chairs against one side of the room where the girls are sitting. "}
{"id": "51268_4", "pid": "51268_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30750, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Karl and Joseph working with water and trying to tie logs together. Karl describes the ground as being thick with shadows. When they finish their work, they walk on a trail through a forest towards Landing City. Landing City is described as having rusting, steel shacks with muddy streets. When they get to Landing City, they begin to line up on the landing field that is decorated with welcome signs in anticipation for the wife draft that is going to begin soon. There are tables on the landing field filled with informational pamphlets and food. \n\nWhen the story goes to Phyllis Hanson it details her leaving work and going to her apartment. Her apartment is a small two-room p[lace. \n\nRuby\u2019s Johnson story begins at a clothing store. She is soon taken to a court for trial after she is caught stealing. \n\nSuzanne\u2019s story is originally set at her apartment. After receiving a call, she leaves and walks to a nearby brownstone that looks like an office building. Once in the brownstone, she is instructed to sit in a room filled with chairs where other women that she recognizes are sitting. \n"}
{"id": "51268_4", "pid": "51268_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30750, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins near Landing City on Altair. There is a river in the thick forest where Hill and Karl work, while their tiny yllumphs nibble on grass in a nearby grove of trees. Landing City is a smudge of corrugated steel shacks that are rusting, muddy streets, and a small rocket port of thirty acres fenced off with barbed wire. Even the main office and headquarter is a dirty shack. The grassy field beside the landing port is decorated with huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table with luncheon food has also been set up. \n\nPhyllis Hansen has a typewriter on her desk and correspondence drawer at the office she works at. There is also a washroom for the ladies' to do their makeup. Her home is a two-room bachelor girl apartment, with a bathroom. The bathroom has a mirror and a shower. There is also a kitchen area to cook, a sink to do the dishes, books, and a sofa to sit on. There is a mail slot to receive mail in too. \n\nRuby Johnson's story takes place in a department store with many counters, including a lingerie one that a man and woman are in. There is also a counter from which Ruby takes the dress. Later, she is sent to the detention center and the courtroom. \n\nFinally, Suzanne Carsten's 'rented' apartment has the latest conveniences, such as a needle shower and perfume dispenser. There is also a built-in soft drink bar in the library, an all-communications set, and an electrical massager. The building that she goes to later is a brownstone one, resembling more of an office building than anything else. Inside, there is a battery of chairs on one side, where many other women are seated. "}
{"id": "51268_4", "pid": "51268_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30750, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in many different places. The story begins on the newly colonised planet, where Karl and Joseph are in a river. They haul themselves out and make their way to the ramshackle city of the area. It is muddy and the buildings are mostly makeshift huts. \nMr. Macdonald and Mr. Escher discuss their issue in the office building of the colonisation board.\nPhyllis Hanson walks home after taking a trip to the bathroom in her office. At home, she goes into the kitchen to make dinner, gets ready for bed in the bathroom and finally curls up on the sofa to read a book. \nRuby Johnson movies from a brightly lit department store, to a courtroom in her part of the story. \nSuzanne begins her story in her comfortable apartment. It has a needle shoer that sprays perfume, a built-in soft drink bar, a library, an all communications set and a massage chair. She then walks the streets to an unusual brownstone office building, where she is taken inside, to a brightly lit room. "}
{"id": "51268_5", "pid": "51268_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat leads Escher and MacDonald\u2019s meeting in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30772, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "They are meeting because currently, there are not as many females on the colonized planets. And this is a huge problem. From the beginning of the colonization, there were more adventuresome males than females, thus they headed for the new world but most of the females stayed behind. The disproportional rate in the genders that gone to colonies lead to five females for every three males on Earth, while the colonies have the opposite. Hence, those girls needs to be shipped from their original planet, in this case the Earth, to colony planets for those males there. However, not many girls are applying to go. Another problem, states MacDonald, is the number of men applying for emigration to colonized planets have been dropping. MacDonald considers this reasonable since it seems illogical for a male to move away from a place that has more females than males. Escher then disregards the qualification for colonization and decides to focus on making the people that don\u2019t want to colonize to colonize, whether it is through convincing or forcing. "}
{"id": "51268_5", "pid": "51268_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat leads Escher and MacDonald\u2019s meeting in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30772, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "MacDonald and Escher meet because the Colonization Board has given MacDonald a blank check to get Escher to fix the gender ratio problem. The Colonization Board is worried about the effects that the gender ratio is having on Earth and the great psychological implications that it presents. They are concerned because it is also becoming more difficult to convince men to colonize planets because they do not want to leave Earth where they are easily favored by women due to their rarity. They have a greater advantage on Earth with their pick of women who cannot be easy picky with their choices. "}
{"id": "51268_5", "pid": "51268_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat leads Escher and MacDonald\u2019s meeting in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30772, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Escher and MacDonald meet to discuss the problems on Earth and how to encourage more people to immigrate to the colonies. They go over the concerning ratio between the two genders on Earth as a result of the colonization problem. Many of the men were initially eager to go into the stars, but the women did not follow as quickly. Many of the women are husbandless too, and men are refusing to emigrate to the colonies because there are so many women on Earth. Furthermore, the women who have grown husbandless have made the societies more puritanical than ever. The Colonization Board is looking for a solution to this problem, which leads MacDonald and Escher to meet. "}
{"id": "51268_5", "pid": "51268_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE GIRLS FROM EARTH\n \n \n By FRANK M. ROBINSON\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another\u2014and neither willing to leave his own world?\n \n\n\n I\n \n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n \n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n \n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n \n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.\n \n \"Together now, Karl. One! Two! \"\n \n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.\n \n \n\n \n \"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n \n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n \n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n \n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n \n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n \n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.\n \n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.\"\n \n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n \n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket.\"\n \n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then.\"\n \n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.\"\n \n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.\"\n \n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families.\"\n \n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.\n \n \n\n \n It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n \n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n \n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n \n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.\n \n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n \n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.\n \n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n \n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n \n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port\u2014a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.\n \n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n \n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.\n \n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n \n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! \"\n \n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.\n \n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n \n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n \n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n \n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet\u2014maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.\n \n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?\"\n \n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're\u2014well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n \n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.\n \n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.\n \n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n \n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n \n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from Earth !\" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.\n \n \n\n \n She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n \n A loudspeaker blared.\n \n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists....\"\n \n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.\n \n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n \n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.\n \n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n \n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.\n \n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n \n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n \n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward....\"\n \n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n \n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n \n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n \n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.\n \n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.\n \n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.\n \n The twinkling fire came nearer.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n \n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n \n \"Please send him right in.\"\n \n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n \n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n \n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n \n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy\u2014MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.\n \n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?\"\n \n \"You know the one\u2014colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left\u2014but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.\n \n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n \n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n \n Escher shook his head blankly.\n \n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy\u2014whatever that means\u2014and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not.\"\n \n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks\u2014if you'll pardon the expression\u2014of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n \n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n \n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n \n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?\"\n \n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?\"\n \n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n \n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit.\"\n \n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n \n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good.\"\n \n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n \n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n \n \"How come?\"\n \n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n \n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n \n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.\n \n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n \n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n \n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.\n \n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.\n \n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n \n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all\u2014provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.\n \n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n \n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly\u2014but not pretty, either.\n \n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n \n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n \n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n \n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out.\"\n \n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us\u2014waiting for the phone to ring.\"\n \n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.\n \n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.\n \n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety\u2014scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n \n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.\n \n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others\u2014call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.\n \n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.\n \n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n \n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n \n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.\n \n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\n  It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!\n \n \n Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\n \n \n\n Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....\n \n \n The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women\u2014a startling disproportion\u2014the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.\n \n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....\n \n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n \n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\n  But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!\n \n \n \n\n \n She took another look at the poster.\n \n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.\n \n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n \n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n \n Time enough, at any rate.\n \n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n \n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.\n \n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n \n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip to take.\"\n \n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n \n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n \n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n \n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.\n \n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.\n \n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n \n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n \n And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n \n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n \n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n \n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.\n \n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought\u2014six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.\n \n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:\n \n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n \n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n \n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n \n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\n \n \n\n V\n \n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.\n \n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.\n \n Well, maybe some day she would.\n \n But not today. And not tonight.\n \n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.\n \n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.\n \n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.\n \n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.\n \n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled pertly.\n \n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n \n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed him in.\n \n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.\n \n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n \n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n \n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please.\"\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n \n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n\"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n \n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n \n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you\u2014security.\"\n \n He stressed the word slightly.\n \n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars.\"\n \n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n \n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss Carstens?\"\n \n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I love to travel!\" she said.\n \n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat leads Escher and MacDonald\u2019s meeting in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30705, "query_start_index": 30707, "query_end_index": 30772, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Escher and MacDonald meet to discuss how to get women to come to the newly colonised planets. When the planets were first colonised, more men than women went, as they had more sense of adventure, and women didn't want to leave the luxury of Earth to go live on a makeshift farm on a muddy planet. The men on these colonised planets need wives however, and they have been given the task of finding a way to get these women on Earth over to these new planets. They try to think of a solution, and come up with one that is in a very much legal, and moral grey area. They decide to give every woman who commits a petty crime a very serious ultimatum. They can either spend ten years in jail and pay a fine of ten thousand dollars, or they can go to these colonises and get a five hundred dollar bonus. "}
{"id": "50848_1", "pid": "50848_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28759, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "An army ship lands near a settlement, and people look out their windows, grumbling about its presence because they want no contact with the army. A soldier disembarks and stands at attention facing the settlement, and the people assume he must be proud, ornery, or drunk. Eventually, a resident named Bob Rossel goes out to see what the soldier wants. The soldier identifies himself as Captain Dylan, explaining that he has a message from Fleet Headquarters for the person in charge. Rossel takes the envelope since they don\u2019t have anyone in charge. A young man inside the ship tosses Dylan a bottle, asks if he can leave, and tells him he\u2019ll be back that night. Rossel is appalled that the younger soldier appears drunk and throws Dylan a bottle of liquor. Dylan tells Rossel to read the message because they don\u2019t have much time and starts walking toward the settlement as the ship takes off.\n\tMan\u2019s first contact with aliens had occurred at the Lupus V Colony in 2360, which aliens destroyed. When the army came to investigate, it found 31 of the 70 colonists dead, with the rest, including women and children, missing. Buildings had burned, and all technical equipment was missing. The security bomb, one of which was planted in each colony to be detonated in such an emergency, had failed to go off\u2014the detonating wire had been dug up where it was buried 12 inches deep and cut. Because there had been 500 years of peace and people were conditioned to be anti-war, the army was small and lacked respect. So the army couldn\u2019t take the time to find out exactly what had happened but just spread the news to other colonies, most of which evacuated before they were attacked.\n\tThe message Dylan delivers is that the aliens are attacking again; this settlement needs to evacuate. A big gloomy man named Rush demands help from the army fleet, but Dylan informs him that the army is too weak to help. Dylan tells them that Lt. Bossio is warning Planet Three and returning that night to pick him up. Everyone must be gone by then. Dylan digs up the detonator wire and finds it has been cut. Rossel tells him their ship will only hold 60 of their 40 colonists and asks Dylan to take the rest on the army ship. Dylan offers to ask Bossio and then shows Rossel the cut wire. They discuss whether a colonist or an animal could have cut it. Dylan splices the wire as Rossel leaves.\n\tMeanwhile, an alien is hiding nearby, watching the humans prepare to leave. He presses a button that disables their ship. Rossel has been trying to reach Planet Three and can\u2019t get an answer; Dylan realizes the colony there is dead, so Bossio is, too. People strip their clothes to reduce their weight and take on more people. Forty-six are able to board. When the ship tries to lift off, it can\u2019t get off the ground.\n\t\n"}
{"id": "50848_1", "pid": "50848_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28759, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Dylan arrives on this newly pioneered planet--only 100 years at that point--to tell the colonists there that they were in grave danger. After hundreds of years of peace and a practically obsolete army, an alien life form was attacking. He emerges from his small ship, flown by his best friend Lieutenant Bossio, and waits in the cold. Finally, Bob Rossel meets him and hears his message. Fleet Headquarters sent Captain Dylan to hand off the letter informing them that Lupus V had been massacred. In 2360, 31 of the 70 colonists died, while the rest were captured. All of their belongings were taken too, and that which remained was burned. After the army arrived, one soldier discovered that the detonator wire was cut. On each planet, there is a bomb placed in the center. So if any aliens were to attack, the colonists could detonate to prevent human secrets from escaping. Only this time, they couldn\u2019t, because the wire was cut. \nSince then, Captain Dylan had evacuated several cities and colonies. With his bottle of booze, Dylan informs the whole colony about the situation at hand and the need to evacuate. They protest at first and call him \u201csoldier boy,\u201d but after he tells them their sister colony, Planet Three, is also being evacuated, they run to pack their things. They are to leave by nightfall. Dylan digs into the ground in search of the detonator but finds the wire cleanly cut. Rossel returns to ask how many his ship can take, since their ship can only take 40, leaving 20 behind. Dylan knows that his ship can only take 10, so they decide to call Planet Three and ask if they have room. \nThey discuss the cut wire and who or what could have done it. Rossel leaves to ask if any of the colonists cut it and ask them to arm themselves in case of battle. After considering telepathy, Dylan leaves and walks out into the snowfall to try and contact Bossio who had yet to reply. A young woman asks him if he wants sentries posted on behalf of her father, and he follows her back to the group. Mr. Rush, her father, is a strong, wise man, and he tries to uncover who cut the wire. Although there is an animal on this planet, the viggle, it was already cleared. Eight sentries rushed out, and the Alien watched them from inside of the tree. Realizing that the humans knew they were in danger, the Alien changed his plans and disabled their ship. Planet Three was already under attack, so the Alien only had to wait till dusk to absorb.\nPlanet Three did not respond to Rossel\u2019s calls, he knew something was off. Dylan realizes he\u2019ll have to stay behind since Bossio was not coming back. The colonists strip and manage to squeeze an extra six people on the ship, thanks to the lessened weight. Rossel stays behind as well. However, the ship doesn\u2019t take off. \n"}
{"id": "50848_1", "pid": "50848_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28759, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "On a distant planet from Earth, Bob Rossel gets out of his warm bed on a cold night to greet a soldier (Captain Dylan) standing in a nearby field after landing his spaceship there. Captain Dylan was there to deliver a message from Fleet Headquarters to the person in charge of the colony of about 60 people, of which Bob claimed there was no one in charge so it might as well be him. The general consensus of the colonists is that peace must be achieved at all costs, and the Fleet army was counterproductive to achieving peace. So, it was quite a stir that a Fleet soldier would show up unexpectedly to deliver a message. The spaceship left with Lieutenant Bossio at the helm, promising to pick the Captain up later.\nThe Captain\u2019s message was that aliens had attacked another colony on Lupus V, killing about half of seventy colonists with the rest missing. All colonies were required to have bombs installed in a central building that would obliterate all the people there should aliens attack them to prevent aliens from gaining any knowledge of human technology or biology. At this colony, the wire from the detonator to the bomb was cut, inexplicably.\nThe Captain quickly hustles the colony on Bob\u2019s planet to evacuate, and they ready a ship that is capable of holding 40 people. It is somber for the 60 people there because not everyone will escape. Only the children, women, and youngest men are going to be loaded. Others in the colony begin pitching in and asking the Captain how to help, like Mr. Rush, who inquires about organizing sentries to post at their perimeter. During all of this, the Captain digs up the underground wire from the detonator to the bomb of this colony and finds it has also been cut very recently and reburied.\nThere is speculation as to who cut this wire, with the Captain thinking it must have been an alien and Bob thinking it must have been a colonist. There is an aside in the story, describing the culprit which is an alien hiding underground amongst the roots of a nearby tree and commanding the alien attack remotely. The alien moves up the attack from nightfall to dusk after seeing how quickly the colonists are mobilizing to escape. \nThe Captain is unable to check in with Lieutenant Bossio, who had gone to planet Three to evacuate the colonists there. It is already nightfall on planet Three, and the alien attack has most likely already killed Bossio. At the close of the story, the colonists have a tear-filled departure loading their ship. The Captain feels kinship with Bob, who is saying goodbye to his wife for the last time as she boards. The people aboard the ship leave their clothes behind to reduce weight - fitting 46 people on a ship that should have only held 40. As the ship doors close and it goes to take off, it is unable to move off the ground.\n"}
{"id": "50848_1", "pid": "50848_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28759, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Jim Dylan arrives in an army ship at an unnamed colony in the midst of winter to warn the colonists of an impending attack by an alien species. Due to hundreds of years of anti-war conditioning, the army has had little to do and their resources have dwindled, so Dylan has spent the last thirty years of his life doing little else other than drinking, getting into trouble, and studying a little bit about military tactics. The colonists are not pleased with his arrival, and Dylan sends his fellow armyman Lieutenant Bossio to nearby Planet Three to begin the process of clearing their colony as well. A man named Rossel leads Dylan into town, where he relays the story of Lupus V and its decimation by alien attackers to a group of colonists. The aliens had killed half the population of Lupus V with a heat ray and the rest of the colonists had gone missing. Prior to the attack, a wire meant to detonate a bomb buried at the center of the colony in case of alien attack had been dug up and cut inexplicably. As a result, the army had been deployed to travel to each remaining colony to warn them. The colonists demand army protection, but Dylan informs them that the army fleet is too under-resourced and short-staffed to do anything other than warn of the attacks. As Dylan goes to investigate the state of the wire buried in this colony, he recalls joining the army back when people admired soldiers and how over time that admiration morphed into disgust because of anti-war conditioning. When he discovers the wire has also been cut, Dylan goes back to the radio shack. Rossel finds him there and they discuss how many people they can fit between the colonists' ship and the army ship. Because of insufficient space, they have to come up with a plan to fit the rest of the colonists. Meanwhile, Rossel asks about the cut wire, and he wonders if one of his people might have cut it out of spite for the government rules. Dylan wonders if it might be animals, or perhaps the aliens using telepathy. With Bossio still not answering his calls, Dylan meets with Rossel and a colonist named Rush, who provides Dylan with sentries and agrees with his theory that aliens are responsible for the cut wires. Meanwhile, an alien observes the action from a control center located underground; this is where he uses a box to schedule the attack on the village and disable the colonists' ship. When Planet Three doesn\u2019t answer, Dylan realizes Bossio must be dead. He returns to the radio shack alone, but an old woman brings him coffee and a mackinaw to keep him warm. This encourages him to go outside to help with the evacuation. When Dylan sees Rossel saying goodbye to his wife, he feels human connection again. Then he sees that the colonists' ship cannot fly."}
{"id": "50848_2", "pid": "50848_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on an unnamed planet some time after an alien attack in the year 2360. Colonists settled the planet and have built a village consisting of several houses and a radio shack. Presumably, this is where the colonists contact other colonies. It is also where the detonator for the security bomb is located, with the wire buried under 12 inches of dirt. The atmosphere is Earth-like. There are thick clouds overnight, and the morning is misty and cold. The breeze carries the smell of snow, and later in the day, the snow arrives. The planet is suitable for agriculture because the colonists have already harvested their warmer weather crops and planted their winter crops. The colonists have advanced technology because they have machines that plant and harvest and automatically run their factories. The temperature is below freezing, so people are staying in their houses and drinking coffee. A sister planet colony on Planet Three is much like this colony. The two colonies maintain contact via radios, and mailships make regular runs between the settlements on the different planets. Every settlement is equipped with a security bomb to be detonated in the event of an alien attack. The purpose of discharging the bomb is to prevent hostile aliens from learning important information about humans, including their technology and body chemistry.\n\nAnother setting mentioned in the story is the Lupus V colony attacked by aliens late in the year 2360. Lupus V had 70 registered colonists, including men, women, and children. It also had technical equipment, radios, guns, machines, and books. When the army arrived after the alien attack, everything had been taken, along with 39 women and children; 31 people died in the attack or the subsequent fire that the aliens set with their heat ray. The security bomb had not been detonated because the wire to it had been cut, even though it was buried 12 inches under the soil.\n"}
{"id": "50848_2", "pid": "50848_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Soldier Boy by Michael Straaha takes place on a very cold and icy planet. Captain Dylan waited in the cold for a long time before Rossel arrived, forcing tears to his eyes. The colonists of this planet are reluctant to leave their beds and have especially thick and warm clothing designed for the cold. The planet was colonized less than a century ago by these pioneers. This process involves setting up plastic houses, sending machines out to the fields to plant crops and fertilize the soil, and factories to transform dirt into coffee. \nAs far as we know, there is only one other alien on this planet: the viggle. This creature is fairly similar to an Earth monkey. With four legs and a slightly mischievous personality, they mostly stay out of the way of the colonists. There are also lizards and trees, showcased by the fact that the Alien is living in the hollow of one. \n"}
{"id": "50848_2", "pid": "50848_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Late in the year 2360, humans have expanded from Earth to colonizing other planets. The colonists are considered pioneers that inflate plastic houses on arrival that harden up. Then they release machines to plant and harvest, and use technology to transmute dirt into coffee (coffee being an important motif in the story for the comfort of home). \nThe unnamed planet that Captain Dylan lands on is in wintertime, bitterly cold, with snow falling often in the story and piling up high enough to cover footprints. The colonists stay inside for the winter, and so his arrival is startling as he stands in a cold field. Captain Dylan is invited into the homes of the colonists as they prepare to evacuate and also digs near the central bomb in the colony to find the cut wire that disabled the security system that would obliterate the colony upon alien attack to preserve human secrets. There is a small ridge around the colony that sentinels can be posted on.\nThe colonists have a \u201cseed of peace\u201d deeply planted in them and have been taught to hate war and despise soldiers. Because of this, there is little support for the army and their numbers have dwindled to the point where they can\u2019t fight off alien attacks. Ironically, the people in this colony are desperate for the Fleet to intervene to save them, but the Captain delivers the news that there is no Fleet to do so.\n"}
{"id": "50848_2", "pid": "50848_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28763, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins at the start of winter following the planting of the winter crops as an icy breeze blows in, smelling of snow. There is a village where the colonists live and a nearby field where the army ship lands. Bushes, trees, and hills can be seen through the snow. Thick clouds gather in the north at night, and in the morning, it is misty and cold. The colony is home to sixty colonists, and they have a sister colony called Planet Three. They have one ship with one deck that can fit forty people and a radio shack used to communicate with other colonies, specifically Planet Three. The colonists sometimes kill a local animal called a viggle for being pesky; a viggle looks like a monkey with four legs. Every colony has been equipped with a bomb buried at the city center that can be triggered by detonation device with a wire attached to it. The alien that has cut this wire makes its control center in a wide, warm room under the base of a tree, where he lies wrapped in a thick, electric cocoon. He has a large box with several knobs with which he controls the timing of the assault on the village and disables the colonists' ship. He also has a chronometer he uses to check the time."}
{"id": "50848_3", "pid": "50848_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Dylan, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28775, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Dylan is in the Fleet army and travels with Lieutenant Bossio to colonies on different planets with the message that an alien attack is imminent and the colonists must evacuate. He has become a drunk, which is not uncommon in the army because soldiers were outcasts. For the past three weeks, he and Bossio have been evacuating colonies\u2014the current one is their fifth and last. Prior to this mission, he has spent the last 30 years hanging around, getting drunk, and waiting for something to happen. He was made a captain just before this mission. Looking back, he finds it humorous that he used to study military tactics as if he would need to know them. After his father died of a hernia that he developed from working too long on a heavy planet, he joined the army. Dylan was lured by the army\u2019s recruiting advertisements calling itself guardians of the frontier. When he enlisted, anti-war conditioning wasn\u2019t as strong as it is now, so people weren\u2019t as resentful and disrespectful of soldiers then. Dylan feels that along the way, after all the time he spent in bars and jails, he lost his core. He also believes it doesn\u2019t matter whether he makes it back home: he has no connections and doesn\u2019t owe anybody anything. Drinking has become a way of life, and while he digs for the wire to the bomb, he takes a drink, but after he finds the wire has been cut, he reaches for his bottle but for the first time in a long time, stops before taking a drink. \nWhen the colonists start looking to him for help and answers, Dylan is somewhat pleased because now they are showing him respect, but he is annoyed, too, since it is only because they are scared and need help. When Dylan learns that Planet Three hasn\u2019t answered any radio calls, he connects that to the fact he hasn\u2019t been able to reach Bossio and concludes that the colonists and Bossio are dead. He knows this means he will have to stay behind on the planet when the colonists leave, but that doesn\u2019t bother him. What does bother him is that Bossio is dead only because they had come to help these people\u2014people who wanted nothing to do with them until their lives were threatened. Bossio was his best friend, and Dylan mourns his loss. Even though Dylan resents the people for their disregard for him and the army, he has sympathy for them. He doesn\u2019t want to watch their pain when the women have to leave their men behind, and he is touched when an old woman offers him coffee and a mackinaw to help him stay warm. As he watches Rossel and other men saying goodbye to their wives and children, Dylan begins losing the shell the last 30 years had created around him and begins to feel that these people are his people.\n"}
{"id": "50848_3", "pid": "50848_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Dylan, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28775, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Dylan is a member of the Earth\u2019s army, presumably reporting back to Fleet Headquarters. His father died of a hernia when he was only 19 years old after years of hard work and grueling labor. This sudden absence left Dylan feeling alone in the world, so he happily signed on when the army came to town, speaking of frontiers to discover and great adventures to be had. However, with an anti-war sentiment spreading across the colonies, there was no real army to join. Their fleets were small and fairly untrained or, at least ill-prepared for war. When Captain Dylan finally got word of an alien attack, he feared that the anti-war thinking would hinder their ability to fight back. \nHe arrives on this cold planet to inform the colonists that they need to evacuate. Since Lupus V, he\u2019s been to several cities and colonies over a few weeks and evacuated them all. Lietenant Bossio, his best friend, dropped him off before flying to Planet Three to evacuate the colony there too. He is dependent on alcohol both for warmth and to get him through. He is met with contempt and hostility, but he perseveres and convinces them of the danger. \nHe drinks to fight off the cold and digs beneath the ground to check the bomb. He discovers that the wire has been cut, like on Lupus V. He ponders telepathy, but is interrupted by Rossel who reveals that they don\u2019t have enough room on their ship for all 60 inhabitants. \nDylan is a little cranky, but tries his best to problemsolve. Slowly they reach a compromise and Dylan buzzes Bossio to see when he\u2019s coming back from Planet Three. He doesn\u2019t hear back. Dylan eventually realizes that Bossio is not coming back, so he will be stuck on this planet while the aliens attack. \nThe story ends with Dylan watching as 46 members of the colony squeeze onto the spaceship, while he resigns himself to his doom. The rocket doesn\u2019t start, and all are left behind. \n"}
{"id": "50848_3", "pid": "50848_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Dylan, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28775, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Dylan spent 30 years in the West end of space on the \u201couter edges of Mankind\u201d doing patrols as a peacetime officer before finally being made a Captain. He has never fired a gun. He developed a habit of drinking alcohol, and often in the story drinks from a bottle on his hip to cope with hard news.\nHe and his Lieutenant, Bossio, were summoned out of a bar with the news of the alien attack on Lupus V and charged with clearing the colonies in danger. They cleared four colonies in three weeks, and this planet was due to be the last. \nAfter landing on the planet, he is initially met with some skepticism by the colonists, who then quickly shift into high gear to follow his instructions to evacuate. He goes about digging up the wire to the safety detonation system in the colony to check it is functioning, but it has recently been cut. He thinks it was an alien, and he turns out to be right. There is a nearby alien hiding under a tree orchestrating the attack that is never discovered by the humans.\nThe Captain sees through helping the colonists to load their ship with 46 people to escape, but on take off it is not able to lift off the ground.\n"}
{"id": "50848_3", "pid": "50848_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Dylan, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28775, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Jim Dylan is a tall, frail-looking army man with pale blue eyes whose appearance is not too neat. He salutes Rossel sloppily when they first meet and delivers an envelope with a message from Fleet Headquarters. After delivering the message, his ship leaves, and Rossel accompanies Dylan back to the village. When Dylan was 19, his father died of a hernia, and he joined the army; those were the days prior to the anti-war conditioning, and people viewed soldiers as \"guardians of the frontier.\" In the ensuing years of boozing, being imprisoned, receiving anti-army insults, and endlessly waiting for something to happen, Dylan had lost the thrill of action and had lost touch with himself. Prior to his deployment with Bossio to clear the colonies, the army had finally made him a captain; even that achievement feels empty to him. Dylan has mostly been drinking for the past thirty years thanks to the army's inaction and the fact that they were universally disrespected and hated by most colonists. However, he had also spent some of that time studying military tactics. Still, he realizes he has never fired a gun. Dylan halfheartedly engages with the colonists when he first arrives to warn them of the impending alien attack. But he slowly warms up to them as he realizes that they actually need his help, and he can offer them that help. He theorizes that the cut wire is the result of telepathic interference by the aliens as they preempt their attack. He works with Rossel to devise an evacuation plan, and Rush provides Dylan with sentries. Dylan is devastated when he learns of Bossio's death. Bossio had been his only friend. In spite of the fact that Bossio had died for people who hated him, Dylan finds he cannot hate the colonists. They simply don't understand that no conflict leads to decay. At the same time, he realizes he cannot truly help them either, so he retreats back to the radio shack.  After an old woman brings him a mackinaw and coffee, Dylan realizes he should help after all. When he sees people removing their clothes to allow more people on board, and he witnesses Rossel tearily saying goodbye to his wife, Dylan feels a human connection he had lost in those thirty years of aimlessness."}
{"id": "50848_4", "pid": "50848_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the army in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28779, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The army has no respect from the colonists; they don\u2019t want anything to do with it because they associate it with war. The people at this time have been conditioned to despise war and anything to do with it. When they see Captain Dylan standing by his ship and facing the village, they think he is ridiculous or possibly drunk. Rossel noticed that Dylan appeared like a typical soldier: not very neat and not very clean, and his salute lacked proper military precision. And when Lt. Bossio tosses Dylan a bottle of liquor, Rossel isn\u2019t surprised because of the reputation soldiers have for being drunks; in fact, Rossel is disgusted by the liquor and Bossio\u2019s drunkenness. When aliens attacked Lupus V in 2360, the army found the destruction and dead and discovered why their security bomb hadn\u2019t detonated. There was little the army could do about the alien attack because the army had become so small and weak. There had been peace for 500 years when people didn\u2019t need the army, so its equipment was old, and many of the soldiers were from the bottom of society: drinkers and gamblers. So the army is just notifying other colonies of the attack and warning them to evacuate. When the colonists learn that they have to evacuate due to the threat of an alien attack, Rossel demands that the fleet defend them, and another man named Rush asks where the army fleet is, expecting it to come to their defense. When Dylan explains there is no fleet, just a few hundred obsolete ships, he is tempted to tell them that no one wants an army until it is needed. Dylan himself has been in the army for 30 years and has never seen any action. And when Rossel realizes the colony\u2019s ship won\u2019t hold all of the colonists, he asks if any fleet ships are within radio distance that they could summon to help with their evacuation, hoping that the army is near enough to be of help. Ironically, the army that they despise now offers their only hope.  "}
{"id": "50848_4", "pid": "50848_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the army in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28779, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After 500 years of peace, few saw the reason for maintaing or keeping an army intact. With anti-war and peace sentiments running abound, those that served were looked down upon, since they were paying for their seemingly worthless service. However, when the aliens attack, suddenly the long-forgotten fleets were called into action, and the drunken soldiers were called to arms. After the years of inactivity and depleted funding, the army is not what it once was and is having trouble containing the alien threat. \nThe army is both the saviour and ultimate enemy in this story, as they could offer protection, but simply don\u2019t have the means to do so. \n"}
{"id": "50848_4", "pid": "50848_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the army in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28779, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The army is significantly smaller than it once was due to humans having a loathing of war and thus, reducing the size of the Fleet over time. Humans have had 500 years of peace and anti-war conditioning, that have led to the army becoming \u201csmall, weak and without respect.\u201d The army could do nothing but warn colonists of attack.\nIronically, the colonists question Captain Dylan why the Fleet isn\u2019t coming to their rescue, to which he describes the Fleet barely exists and now only has a \u201cfew hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born.\u201d In this way, the army is significant in the story because it is not wanted by many, but it comes to be called on for help anyways in their time of need.\nCaptain Dylan has worked for thirty years as a peacetime soldier and thinks to himself that peace-loving nations in the history of Earth never stay strong, but does not go on to labor the point to the colonists. He feels deeply sad that his only friend, Bossio, was already dead from trying to help these people that didn\u2019t support the army, and that he too would soon have the same fate. Captain Dylan shakes off this mentality and in the end feels that he can\u2019t hate the colonists for wanting peace because it is a noble thing for trying to achieve.\n"}
{"id": "50848_4", "pid": "50848_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the army in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28779, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The people of the village have been taught over the years to hate war, and as a result, they also hate soldiers. They suspect every soldier they meet is a drunk, which Captain Dylan appears to confirm when he catches a bottle tossed to him by an associate upon first arriving at the village. Later, Dylan recalls the thirty years of his army career, which has largely been spent drinking and getting into trouble. Due to hundreds of years of anti-war conditioning, the army is under-resourced, understaffed, and underfunded. In fact, there are only a few hundred ships left that are mostly obsolete and a handful of army leadership and government jobs available. However, when the aliens attack, the army deploys Dylan and Bossio to help warn and evacuate as many colonies as possible, which they do to little fanfare. In fact, Bossio dies in the effort, and it appears that Dylan might as well."}
{"id": "50848_5", "pid": "50848_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the cut wire?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When the army investigates the destruction of Lupus V, it discovers that the wire to the bomb that would blow up the community had been cut. The wire was hidden 12 inches under the ground, so it would not have been easy to find. Since the wire was cut, the bomb didn\u2019t explode, enabling the aliens to take the women and children, along with all the technology, from the planet. The purpose of the bomb was to prevent the aliens from gaining knowledge of human technology and body chemistry; presumably, aliens would be able to use this information against humans in the future. Because Dylan knows of the cut wire on Lupus V, he checks the wire for the bomb on the planet he has come to evacuate. When he discovers the wire is cut here, too, he notes that the ends are clean, so someone made the cut recently. The ground over the wire was packed down, so whoever cut it also wanted to hide that it had been tampered with. Rossel assumes one of the colonists must have cut the wire, possibly thinking it was dangerous for the colonists and just a silly government rule. After Dylan tells him about the wire being cut on Lupus V, Rossel plans to question everyone. Dylan wonders if the aliens could have cut it by telepathy of one of the colonists but rules that out because if they could control one human, they could control all of them. Dylan then wonders if an alien has done it. No one knows what the aliens look like, but for them to have intelligence, they would need a large brain, making the alien about the size of a large dog. Dylan knows all the animals on the planet had been vetted before the colony was settled. When he tells the others his suspicion, Rush says the only animal they\u2019ve seen nearby is a viggle, which is something like a monkey with four legs. The viggle passed Biology\u2019s screening, so the viggle is ruled out. Although Dylan doesn\u2019t discover the alien hidden in its electric cocoon, he is convinced that aliens cut the wire. He is also convinced that the alien attack is imminent.\n"}
{"id": "50848_5", "pid": "50848_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the cut wire?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After the 70 colonists on Lupus V were either captured or killed, the soldiers discovered a cut wire leading to the detonator. The bombs were placed to protect human secrets, chemistry, and biology from prying alien hands. The fact that someone or something knew about the bomb and knew how to preven it from detonating suggests that the aliens are more intelligent about human life than everyone previously thought. \nWhen Captain Dylan finds the cut wire on the ice-cold colony, he realizes that they need to evacuate as quickly as possible, since this is the sign that the aliens are already here. \n"}
{"id": "50848_5", "pid": "50848_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the cut wire?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The wire being discussed is one which connects a detonator to a bomb mandated to be a the center of each human colony for security purposes. The bomb is intended to destroy the entire colony and all the people in it upon alien attach so that the aliens don\u2019t learn about human technology and body chemistry.\nThe bomb on Lupus V, the first colony to be attacked, did not blow because the wire had been cut. Thus, the alien attack captured many of the humans there, potentially giving them access to their technology and biology that humans had been trying to keep secure. Similarly, the wire had been cut on the planet that Captain Dylan landed on to evacuate in the story, which he discovered by digging down to it almost a foot underground. The reader learns there is an alien hiding underground nearby controlling the attack that may have been capable of cutting the wire through something like telepathy. The significance that two wires were cut in the same way suggests that the aliens are mounting a concerted attack on many human colonies and disabling their detonators in order to gain advantages over humans by learning their secrets.\n"}
{"id": "50848_5", "pid": "50848_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nSOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated\u2014another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\n \n\n In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n \n\n \u2014 Scandinavian legend\n \n\n \n Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.\n \n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.\n \n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.\n \n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n \n \"What's he just standing there for?\" another lady said.\n \n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.\n \n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\n \n \n\n \n Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.\n \n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n \n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n \n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n \n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n \n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n \n Dylan turned and nodded.\n \n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n \n \"Was he drunk ?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of liquor ?\"\n \n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time.\"\n \n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.\n \n \n\n \n After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\n \n \n\n \n The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360\u2014the exact date remains unknown\u2014an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.\n \n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.\n \n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.\n \n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n \n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.\n \n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.\n \n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.\n \n \n\n \n An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n \n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n \n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.\n \n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus, Lupus\u2014doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n \n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n \n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n \n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand....\"\n \n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n \n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n \n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n\"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then.\"\n \n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n \n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.\n \n Dylan had been called up out of a bar\u2014he and Bossio\u2014and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.\n \n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n \n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.\n \n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n \n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died\u2014of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet\u2014and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n \n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n \n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.\n \n \n\n \n Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.\n \n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.\n \n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n \n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?\"\n \n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n\"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n \n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n \n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck\u2014she's all we could afford.\"\n \n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n \n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n \n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.\n \n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\" Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n \n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.\n \n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n \n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n \n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n \n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\n \n \n\n \n It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n\"Maybe an animal?\"\n \n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too\u2014newly cut.\"\n \n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n \n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again.\"\n \n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n \n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n \n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n \n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.\n \n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n \n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n \n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.\n \n Were they small? Little animals?\n \n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n \n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n \n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had\u2014he never had fired a gun.\n \n \n\n \n The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.\n \n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk\u2014maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....\n \n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n \n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.\n \n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man\u2014who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n \n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n \n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n \n \"But they have a contract!\"\n \n The soldier grinned.\n \n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n\"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\n \n \n\n \n Dylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien cut it.\"\n \n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of us did it.\"\n \n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n \n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n \n \"Might be.\"\n \n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n \n Rush calmly\u2014at least outwardly calmly\u2014lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n \n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n \n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n \n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n \n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n \n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries.\"\n \n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n \n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n \n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n\"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n \n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.\n \n \n\n \n The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.\n \n \n\n \n He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n \n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.\n \n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n \n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.\n \n \n\n \n When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n \n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.\n \n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead\u2014the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.\n \n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n \n Bossio\u2014a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges\u2014Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\n \n \n\n \n But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.\n \n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n \n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n \n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.\n \n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n \n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n \n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell\u2014she couldn't get off the ground.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the cut wire?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28717, "query_start_index": 28719, "query_end_index": 28770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Each colony had a bomb buried in the center, which would be detonated in the event of an alien attack in order to prevent them from learning important facts about human technology and body chemistry. When the aliens attacked and destroyed Lupus V in 2360, the army investigated the remnants of the colony there; they discovered the wire that was hidden under a foot of earth and was intended to trigger the detonation had been dug up and cut, thereby preventing detonation. Dylan discovers a similar situation when he arrives at the unnamed colony of the story. When he finds the cut wire, Rossel believes it is one of the colonists lashing out against a government they do not respect. When Rush sees the wire, he agrees with Dylan that it must be some kind of telepathic alien intervention. In fact, an alien had cut the wire, presumably by deploying a box that allowed it to perform actions remotely from a subterranean control center. The cut wire provides the warning the colonists need in order to have time to evacuate before the alien attack."}
{"id": "51167_1", "pid": "51167_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29473, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jeff Elliott and his wife Ann meet a peculiar stranger, Mr. Snader, at a restaurant in the year 1957 as they are discussing Jeff\u2019s desire to go 5 years into the past to buy a building for $2000 that would\u2019ve changed his luck entirely. The stranger had been listening to their conversation and was seeking someone with Jeff\u2019s credentials (color television engineer) to complete an illegal job he\u2019d been hired for. Jeff and Ann have no idea that Mr. Snader is on such a job, but entertain his quirky conversation.\n\nMr. Snader has a friendly and persuasive personality, narrowly convincing Jeff and Ann to follow him to his time travel station and take a free trip to see if they like it. The Elliots do not perceive the situation as dangerous, and continue choosing to trust him at each step. Ultimately, the Elliots are escorted six years back in time through a time travelling process that appears like stepping through a screen, but their past is nothing like they remember. It is a different place entirely, and though they are frightened, their excitement and perhaps also their complete reliance on Mr. Snader to get them back home, causes them to keep following him even though he has become mean with them. \n\nMr. Snader takes the Elliotts to an apartment house to meet Septo Kersey and Dumont Bullen, the general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine. It\u2019s revealed that Mr. Snader tricked the Elliots, and brought them to Mr. Bullen who had illegally sought Jeff\u2019s services as a color engineer to profit his own interests by creating color television that did not yet exist in their time. Jeff was furious, and totally helpless.\n\nJeff and Ann were allowed to leave, because their captors were certain that they could not actually escape them. They had no idea how to leave this timeline, and had no way of finding justice being illegally present with no work permits. When Jeff and Ann stop for lunch and try to pay with the money in their pockets (which appears as illegal tender), they are approached by an officer and find out they are in a place called Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Everyone in the interaction is deeply confused, because time travel is not understood to be possible by the public - Jeff and Ann look crazy. Both are escorted to separate jail cells in a prison.\n\nOne of Mr. Bullen's barmen, a lawyer, was sent to arrange Jeff\u2019s release, if he was willing to cooperate and go work for Mr. Bullen. The lawyer has to explain to Jeff the concept of time travelling before he can get any cooperation, and so says that time travel is entering a different dimension, not moving along a linear timeline. Things look so different to Jeff in the past because he didn\u2019t travel back a linear path to exactly the way things were when he experienced these things six years ago. The story ends during their discussion.\n"}
{"id": "51167_1", "pid": "51167_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29473, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The year is 1957. Jeff and Ann sit at a restaurant and discuss Jeff\u2019s business troubles. He is concerned that he made a bad business choice five years ago. Ann tries to reassure him that that he has plenty of time to make it all back again. Greet Snader, a foreign man with a mustache, sits nearby, and overhears their conversation. He asks if they would like to go back in time. Jeff tries to leave, but Ann insists that they listen to what he has to say. Snader hands them his card and offers them a free trial. He calls Jeff Mr. Elliot although Jeff has not given the stranger his name. This gives Jeff the slightest sense of hesitation, but Ann is eager to go with Snader.\n\nAnn and Jeff follow Snader to the station, which turns out to be a reasonably-sized home in a residential neighborhood. Inside, there are two screens hanging from the ceiling. One is labeled \u201cAnte\u201d while the other is labeled \u201cPost.\u201d Each screen shows a movie, and when Snader salutes the people that appear on one screen, the strangers wave back. Ann and Jeff are both shocked because the entire thing seems impossible. Ann and Jeff watch Snader step into one of the screens, and when they look at the other screen, he steps out. \n \nSnader tells them they are going back six years. They step into a screen and jump out a few moments later. When they walk through the same door they entered, the surroundings are different, and Jeff\u2019s car has been replaced by a limousine. Snader drives, and they do not recognize anything around them. Snader stops the car outside of a building and tells them to follow him inside. \n\nAnn and Jeff meet Mr. Bullen. He explains that he is the general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, and he needs Jeff, someone from the future, to make sure that he gets colored television before anyone else. Jeff refuses to work for him, but Bullen says that Jeff is there illegally without a permit or a file. Jeff and Ann call his bluff and leave, but Bullen reminds them to call Butterfly 9 if they get in trouble. The couple goes to a restaurant, and when Jeff tries to pay, the cashier says it\u2019s counterfeit. They find out that they\u2019re in a country called Continental Federation, and these people have never heard of the U.S. Jeff and Ann are taken to jail. One of Mr. Bullen\u2019s henchmen shows up to talk to Jeff, and he explains that Jeff and Ann went back in time six years, but time isn\u2019t like a movie. Events don\u2019t stay consistent in the past because dimensions change. Technically, Snader didn\u2019t lie, but he manipulated Jeff into believing that time traveling is something that it\u2019s not. \n"}
{"id": "51167_1", "pid": "51167_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29473, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\n\tJeff and Ann Elliott are having dinner in a restaurant after Jeff has learned he\u2019ll need to start his business over again after his building is sold. They are approached by a man at the next table who has been watching and listening to them and who offers them a chance to get away. At first, they think he means a trip, but he is referring to time travel. Jeff says he wishes he could go back five years and buy the building. The man offers them time travel for free and gives Jeff his business card, identifying him as Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent for the 4-D Travel Beuro. Snader invites them to come with him and indicates they can be back in one hour. Jeff and Ann ask many questions but ultimately decide to go with Snader to see what he is about.\nHe takes them to his station, a mid-sized home in a middle-class neighborhood, and shows them a room labeled 701 with two screens, indicating that they are showing people who are time traveling right now in the fourth dimension. He waves at some of them, and they wave back at him. Snader demonstrates how the screens work, walking into one and then exiting from the other. Jeff wants to try this, and he and Ann enter. Snader says they will exit at Station 725 which is six years in the past. When they exit the screen, they are in another house; Snader escorts them to a limousine outside, explaining to Jeff that his car isn\u2019t there because it\u2019s in the future. Jeff and Ann notice that the street seems somehow different than it did when they arrived. \nSnader drives them across town, using a freeway where Jeff knows there was only a boulevard in the past. He accuses Snader of taking them to the future rather than the past, but Snader doesn\u2019t respond. He pulls up in front of an apartment building and tells Jeff that he\u2019ll learn everything upstairs when Jeff demands answers before getting out of the car. In a luxurious apartment, they are introduced to Septo Kersey, who congratulates Snader for bringing Jeff and then takes the couple to meet Mr. Bullen. Bullen confirms that Jeff understands radioptics and chromatics and then tells him that he will develop these features for his company. Angered, Jeff tells Bullen he won\u2019t be told who he works for and that he and Ann are leaving. Bullen allows them to go but warns that they will be in serious legal trouble since they have no immigrate permit or citizen file. \nJeff and Ann walk to a restaurant at a nearby shopping center to eat, and all the food on the menu is unfamiliar. They eat a meal, but when Jeff tries to pay with his money, the clerk calls the police over because his money is no good. Jeff and Ann are locked in jail overnight until Bullen\u2019s lawyer comes the next day to get them out.\n"}
{"id": "51167_1", "pid": "51167_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29473, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Over dinner, Ann tells her husband Jeff (a TV color specialist) that he will be able to make a comeback after his building's lease has expired. Snader, a man at the next table who had been listening, suggested that they go back in time to get a better deal on the sale. Jeff dismisses him but the man joins them at their table, explaining that he\u2019s from a different time and offering them a free trial time-travel trip at the \u201c4-D Travel Beuro\u201d, Ann asks for more details: Snader invites people who want change, but he knows more about Jeff than expected. Despite these concerns, his wife agrees to give time travel a try. They head to an average home in a good neighborhood that serves as Snader\u2019s office, where they meet Peter Powers, a bureau agent. They enter a room labeled \"701\" with two large screens with moving pictures; the people on these screens are explained to be time travelers in the fourth dimension. This time groove can reach as early as 600AD, with convicts from Snader's time working to build the groove further back. Snader walked into one of the screens, and Jeff and Ann saw him in the other screen shortly after. Jeff is convinced this is a visual trick and wants to be shown how it works, and hesitantly steps into one of the screens. Snader leads them six years prior but tells them they can\u2019t ask any more questions, and they get out at station 725, a room that looks identical to the one they left from. Nothing else is the same: Powers is gone, and the street outside looks different; Snader insists it\u2019s because they have traveled through time. Ann is over her fear and feels excited, figuring that they were in the future instead of the past because of a freeway they did not recognize, but Snader doesn\u2019t confirm anything. They explore and eventually meet an older man named Septo Kersey, who has asked for Snader to retrieve Jeff to work for him, as a sort of informant in color television technology. Kersey and Bullen (another man who works for the company) threaten the couple, saying they were illegal immigrants in this particular time stream. Jeff and Ann insist on leaving, and are given instructions of how to return if they get into trouble. It\u2019s now Ann who\u2019s concerned, and Jeff tries to calm her as they look for food. After they eat, they learn that their money isn\u2019t recognized in this society; they are in the Continental Federation, not the United States, even though their languages are mutually intelligible. Jeff is convinced he\u2019s so far in the future that the US has been forgotten, the police think he\u2019s trying to fool them. One of Bullen\u2019s lawyers was there for them when they woke up, and tried to explain that time is a dimension, not a series of events, so that nobody would have experienced the same history that Jeff had. "}
{"id": "51167_2", "pid": "51167_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the settings the story takes place in.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29490, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Earth, in the year 1957. It opens in a restaurant, and quickly transitions to Mr. Snader\u2019s 4-D TRAVEL BEURO time travel station, inside of a \u201cmiddle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood.\u201d They could hear traffic dimly in the station and see mountains out the windows on the horizon.  \n\nThe time travelling room appears like a doctor's waiting room, with chair lined walls. There is a station sign - 701 - that hangs on the ceiling and two movie screens on the far ends of the room. Stepping through one screen would take them forwards in time, and one backwards in time. The Elliotts go to station 725, which Mr. Snader tells them is six years in the past.\n\nThe past is very unfamiliar, more industrialized with more highways than they remember. After travelling in a limousine, they transition to a 6th floor apartment house of a building with heavy carpets and soft lighting.\nThe final settings are a lunch counter, with unfamiliar food to the Elliotts, and finally their jail cells.\n"}
{"id": "51167_2", "pid": "51167_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the settings the story takes place in.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29490, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ann and Jeff meet Greet Snader in a restaurant where they are having dinner and discussing Jeff\u2019s business troubles. After meeting Snader, they follow him to a place called a \u201cstation.\u201d They are surprised to find that it\u2019s actually a moderately-sized home in a residential neighborhood. It doesn\u2019t look suspicious at all. Jeff notes the mountains on the horizon and the warm breeze he feels before he steps inside. Snader uses a key hanging from his necklace to unlock the door, and once inside, he leads the couple to an area that looks a lot like a doctor\u2019s waiting room. However, there are two screens hanging from the ceiling, and they are both playing moving pictures. There is a large plaque that says \u201c701\u201d, and Jeff and Ann do not know what to make of it. They are even more dumbfounded when Snader salutes some of the people on screen, and they wave back at him. \n\nAfter Jeff and Ann time travel, they exit the screen and find that the room looks very similar to the one they were just in. For a moment, they believe that Snader has tricked them. However, when they leave the building, they find a limousine out front instead of Jeff\u2019s car. They drive through the city they call home, but none of the signs and landmarks are even remotely the same. \n\nAfter leaving Mr. Bullen\u2019s office, they walk around town a little bit and quickly realize that the language on all the signage is different from how they speak. One reads, \u201c'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!\u201d Ann also notes that the women dress strangely, and it\u2019s unlike anything she\u2019s ever seen before. After noticing that all of the food at the restaurant looks slightly different than what they\u2019re used to, they learn that they are actually in the town of Costa, in the state of West Goodland, in the country of Continental Federation. The language they are speaking is called Federal, and the cash they are using appears to be counterfeit. Although Jeff and Ann believed they would be returning to the exact same world they knew six years ago when Ann\u2019s father was alive and he lived with them, they were misled by Snader. The couple was actually taken to a different dimension where events have unfolded in completely different ways.\n"}
{"id": "51167_2", "pid": "51167_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the settings the story takes place in.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29490, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The first setting is 1957 in a small, crowded, noisy, and hot restaurant. Jeff and Ann are having dinner, and Snader\u2019s table is near enough that he can overhear the couple talking. This enables him to join their conversation and eventually lure them into time travel.\nSnader takes the Elliotts to the second setting, the station where he begins their time travel. The station is located in a mid-sized house in a middle-class neighborhood. Lights are glowing in the windows as they arrive, and outside they can hear the traffic on the boulevard a few blocks away. It is dusk, the weather is warm, and Jeff can see the mountains on the horizon. Snader unlocks the door, and they are greeted by a man at a desk in the hallway who sends them to another room. \nThis room is the station. A sign with the number 701 hangs from the middle of the ceiling, and there are two big screens like movies screens hanging on one wall, showing movement through a corridor with rows of seats like a railroad car. There are easy chairs along the walls, making it look like a doctor\u2019s office waiting room. \nWhen they enter the screen, they are in the chair-lined corridor. Snader tells the Elliotts to sit, and they face a screen like the one in the room they had just left. The image on the screen makes it look as if they are racing through a dark tunnel toward a light at the far end. As they approach the light, they see a room like 701, but this one is 702. They exit at room 725 by stepping through the screen.\nStation 725 looks much like 701, but when they leave the room, there is a motherly old lady outside. Snader tells them they aren\u2019t there for lodging, and they leave the house. Outside, Jeff notices his car is missing. Snader tells him it\u2019s in the future. The street outside the house has different trees and houses than he remembered in the neighborhood with the 701 station. Telephone poles and streetlights also seem different. As the limousine pulls away from the curb, Jeff makes it a point to remember the street name, Green Thru-Way, and the block number, 800. Ann notices bars on the windows of the house. The limo heads onto a freeway where the boulevard should be, but the mountains are the same as always. Signs are unfamiliar and have strange wording like Rite Channel for Creepers and Yaw for Torrey Rushway.\nSnader takes the Elliotts to an apartment building near a shopping center with bright lights and lots of shoppers, neither of which are familiar. Snader escorts them inside the apartment building, riding the elevator to the sixth floor and traversing a heavily carpeted hallway with soft gold lights. Later they eat at a restaurant with unfamiliar food names and monetary units; their check is for 1/20. Finally, the Elliotts are imprisoned in a jail with smelly cells.\n\n"}
{"id": "51167_2", "pid": "51167_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the settings the story takes place in.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29490, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts in a restaurant, but quickly moves to a house that is known as the 4-D Travel Beuro. This is a fairly typical, mid-range house of average size in a good neighborhood, which keeps it from sticking out in any way because nobody would be suspicious of it. Inside the house there are a number of ornate rooms locked behind closed doors, guarded by a bureau agent known as Peter Powers. Behind one of these doors is the room that serves as station 701 on this particular time groove, that has two large screens that show moving images of people who seem to be aware of the people standing in the room. People can easily step into these rooms and find themselves traveling on a time groove, and this is how Jeff and Ann travel to the time Snader is from. Once they have traveled through time, they expect to see the same suburban neighborhood but much of the context has changed: a different highway, different cars, and different houses. The people in this time use different currency and have different vocabulary than the people Jeff and Ann are used to. After some time in lockup, Jeff and Ann also encounter an apartment building. On the sixth floor of this building, they meet the man who hired Snader to find Jeff. There is an ornate drawing room where Jeff and Ann have a meeting with Septo Kersey and a man named Bullen who are hoping they can use Jeff's expertise to move ahead of the technological developments of their own time. Refusing to help, Jeff and Ann leave and are eventually captured for not having legal money, and the story ends with them in a holding cell at a local police station."}
{"id": "51167_3", "pid": "51167_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of time in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Time travel is suggested as a way to solve troubles. To fix regrets. Ironically, it is not this at all, because the way time travel works is not linear. Thus, it\u2019s not possible to go back to an exact moment in your past and make a different decision.\n\nJeff is very impatient about the time they are spending with Mr. Snader, but continues to be roped into one thing and the next by convincing himself that they are in no real danger. There is a kind of tension between Jeff feeling like he is wasting time, but then allowing time to run on as their involvement with Mr. Snader deepens further and further until they lose 6 years of time completely.\n"}
{"id": "51167_3", "pid": "51167_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of time in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At the beginning of the story, Jeff is worried that he has lost so much time on his failed business. Ann tries to convince him that he\u2019s still plenty young, and he has many years to make back whatever he lost. Snader hears their conversation and butts in. Ann and Jeff don\u2019t realize that he has already had his sights on them specifically because Jeff has been ordered by Mr. Bullen to improve his business. Bullen wants to make colored television before anyone else can, and in order to do that he needs someone from the future to give him the secrets. \n\nSnader makes Jeff and Ann believe they are going on an adventure to visit the past that they knew only six years ago, but he lies to them. They do not understand that the past does not work like a movie. When you travel to the past, the events change. This is because time is a dimension, and it is not linear. One of Bullen\u2019s henchmen explains to Jeff that if he went back to 1865, there would no longer be a Civil War, and no one would know who Abraham Lincoln is. Landmarks, like the mountains outside of the station, will not change, but events will. "}
{"id": "51167_3", "pid": "51167_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of time in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Time is significant in the story because it is the basis for Jeff\u2019s unhappiness and the couple\u2019s reception of Snader\u2019s travel offer. The reality of time as a dimension is why Jeff doesn\u2019t recognize the past when he and Ann travel back. Jeff wishes he could go back in time five years and buy the building where he has been working for $2,000. It has just sold for $12,000, and now he has to leave and start his business over again. Snader\u2019s offer of time travel appeals to Jeff and Ann because Jeff believes he\u2019ll be able to buy the building. Snader\u2019s assurance that they can be back in an hour helps persuade the couple to go with him to the nearby station. When they go into the screen to travel through time and Snader drives them along a freeway that didn\u2019t exist in the present 1957 or five years earlier, Jeff is convinced that Snader has actually taken them to the future. Kersey tells them that they have traveled six years back in time before the development of chromatics (color television). Bullen wants Jeff to develop color television for his company, Continental Radioptic Combine, so that he will be first on the market with color TVs. When Jeff and Ann eat at the restaurant, and Jeff tries to pay with two one-dollar bills, the clerk calls the bills \u201cstage money\u201d and motions for a policeman to come to them. The officer looks at the bills and wonders aloud what the United States of America is and tells Jeff he is in Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. None of this makes sense to Jeff and Ann, and when Jeff is interrogated at the police station, the questions seems stupid to him. When Bullen\u2019s lawyer arrives to get Jeff and Ann out of jail, he explains to Jeff that he did travel six years in the past but that time is a dimension rather than a stream of events. He indicates that if Jeff went back to 1865, the people there would know nothing of Lincoln or the Civil War. Therefore, Jeff\u2019s idea that he could buy the building is incorrect because different events will be happening in 1952. \n"}
{"id": "51167_3", "pid": "51167_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of time in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Time plays a few roles in this story. One is the motivation for Jeff and Ann to be interested in the time-travel technology in the first place: if Jeff could travel back in time a few years, he could sign a lease for a building for a much cheaper price that the going rate in his own time. Snader takes advantage of this fact to slip himself into the conversation the couple is having and offer his services in time travel, the particular mechanics of which are another major role of time in this story. Snader offers a time travel service that works with a technology too complicated for him to be able to explain, but for which we see two screens in one room that have moving images on them. These screens show people passing through the timestream and work as stations along a moving path of time, kind of like a train line. Once the group travels on this \"time groove\", they notice a number of differences in the \"new\" time, the past that Snader comes from. In fact, because of the differences, even though Ann and Jeff are in the past, they think that they must be far in the future because of how different things are. One of these is the construction of a highway that was not there during their time, and the other is that nobody has heard of the United States of America. Jeff figures that nobody has heard of where he comes from because they have moved so far forward in time, when it is really because in this version of the past, the United States did not develop in the way it did in Jeff's time. Because time affects the way language develops, it is interesting that one of the major differences between the time Jeff and Ann live in compared to the time Snader is from is the way people talk. In the past (that is, Snader's time), there are a lot of phrases and nouns that do not match the same words that Jeff and Ann have for those same concepts. The word for lawyer, for instance, differs. However, the languages have enough in common for the people from the different times to communicate with one another. The story ends with a discussion of how this time travel works, to show how differently the various people think about time. "}
{"id": "51167_4", "pid": "51167_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between Jeff and Ann?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29494, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jeff and Ann Elliott are a married couple. Ann is supportive of Jeff, and assures him that with their youth he will be able to rebuild his failed business. She reassures him throughout the story, even at points where it ultimately leads them into deeper trouble - such as when she tells him it wouldn\u2019t hurt to try Mr. Snader\u2019s time travel. \n\nJeff is protective of Ann on several occasions, like at the start of the story suggesting he would start a brawl at the restaurant if the stranger was interested in Ann\u2019s beauty. He is also upset enough with his business struggles that he needs to take sleeping pills, of which Ann is concerned about the amount.\n\nThey remain together in the story until they are held in separate jail cells. They do not have any major disagreements in the story, and seem to enjoy their time together, only hoping to improve their lot by trying a risky time travel adventure.\n"}
{"id": "51167_4", "pid": "51167_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between Jeff and Ann?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29494, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jeff and Ann have a loving and supportive relationship. When Jeff is feeling down on himself, Ann reminds him that he\u2019s great at his job and that he has plenty of time to bounce back. She worries about the number of pills he\u2019s taking, and she insists that he stop worrying about losing his lease. She is genuinely concerned for his mental health and his overall well-being. The couple can easily joke around with one another. When Ann suggests that Snader might be following them, she makes light of the situation by suggesting that it\u2019s because he\u2019s attracted to her. Jeff, in turn, offers to physically assault him if he tries anything. After meeting Mr. Snader, both Jeff and Ann have a good time playing along with the scenario they never imagined themselves being a part of. It doesn\u2019t take a lot of prodding on Ann\u2019s part to make Jeff go to the station with her and Snader. They both have a devil-may-care attitude that makes this adventure worth checking out. \n\nLater, when they find themselves in a heap of trouble and end up in separate jail cells, Jeff can only think of Ann. He worries about her being all alone for the night. \n"}
{"id": "51167_4", "pid": "51167_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between Jeff and Ann?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29494, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jeff and Ann are like many married couples; when one is down or frightened, the other tries to build him up or assure him that all will be fine. They switch between these roles with each other easily, suggesting that they have been married a good while. Ann is supportive of Jeff\u2019s career and his skills, assuring him that he will be able to start over and be successful again. She also teases him and makes humorous comments to lighten his mood. When they disagree with each other, it isn\u2019t antagonistic. When Jeff wants to leave but Ann wants to hear what Snader has to say, she simply puts her hand on Jeff\u2019s arm and says she hasn\u2019t finished eating and would like to hear what Snader has to say. Jeff and Ann also play off of each other. When Ann jumps up to see what Snader wants to show them, Jeff\u2019s pulse picks up as he entertains the idea, too. They make decisions together; when Jeff is undecided about going into the apartment building, he looks to Ann to see her reaction. When she says they might as well go inside and see what is there, Jeff agrees and goes along with her. They make a good team: Bullen\u2019s comment that Jeff is going to make his company be the first to produce chromatics, Jeff\u2019s takes affront at the man\u2019s boldness, and Ann is likewise disturbed.\n"}
{"id": "51167_4", "pid": "51167_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between Jeff and Ann?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29494, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jeff and Ann react differently to most things, but in a way where they are able to balance each other out. For instance, when they meet Snader at the beginning of the story, Jeff is frustrated with the interruption to his dinner and does not want to hear more about what he thinks is bogus, but Ann is curious and wants to hear Snader out, to be entertained if nothing else. Ann is very supportive of Jeff and the story starts with her trying to console him about the recent failure of his business venture as a lease on a building he was using had ended. While reassuring him, she reminds him that he is excellent at what he does and have no trouble starting up again, but Jeff is feeling very grumpy and sad about the entire situation. Jeff is very cautious, and is concerned when he hears Snader use his last name, because he had never given the man his name. Ann is more on the curious side, willing to give anything a try, including a method of time travel she only knew about from a stranger she encountered at a restaurant. She does get a little bit nervous once she has actually stepped inside the device, but the fear dissipates once she is outside again in a whole new world. Although Jeff starts the story upset, he remains mostly calm throughout the story and even when he is hesitant he does not become overwhelmed with fear at his situation. He and Ann both have to encounter some issues with their money not working, and sorting out what to make of their situation, but they support each other and keep each other calm throughout the story. "}
{"id": "51167_5", "pid": "51167_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between the Elliotts and Mr. Snader?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Initially, the Elliotts find Mr. Snader to be peculiar with his mustache, facial scar, traces of a broken nose, and accented speech. Jeff is not interested in engaging with him, but Ann continues to deepen their conversation with him at the restaurant thinking that Mr. Snader is insane and she will humor his ideas.\n\nMr. Snader shows hints of being forceful to the Elliots throughout the story. His persuasiveness to come to his time travel station is forceful at times, he takes their arms to escort them into the future portal (as if he wants to ensure their compliance), and once they are roaming the city in the future Mr. Snader largely drops the act and stops being nice to the Elliots altogether (ignoring their requests for him to drive safely, and being curt with them to get them into his drop off spot with Mr. Bullen).\n\nThe Elliots are captivated by the silliness of Mr. Snader\u2019s story at first, believing it is a magic trick right up until they travel into the past, and then seem largely blinded by their curiosity and excitement to think critically about how much danger they are really in. They acknowledge Mr. Snader is being deceitful at times, like when Jeff asks for his questions to be answered, but become so reliant on Mr. Snader\u2019s support to get them back home that they remain with him. When Mr. Snader\u2019s plan is revealed - that he has delivered the Eliotts into the past to be forced into labor to create a color television company - they feel betrayed by Mr. Snader.\n"}
{"id": "51167_5", "pid": "51167_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between the Elliotts and Mr. Snader?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Elliots are initially wary of Snader. They look at him before he approaches them in the restaurant, and Ann tells her husband that she thinks she saw him outside in the parking lot. She wonders aloud if he has been following them. When he first starts up a conversation with them, Jeff immediately wants to leave, and it\u2019s Ann who gets a kick out of the improbable dialogue they have. She wants to learn more about his insane-sounding ideas about time travel, although she doesn\u2019t necessarily believe anything he\u2019s saying at first. Both Jeff and Ann laugh at the card that Snader hands them because nearly every word is misspelled and to them he appears unprofessional. \n\nThey do not spend very much time with Snader, but they appear to trust him quite readily. They are skeptical about his promises and insist that it\u2019s probably all fake, but they don\u2019t associate the dishonesty with Snader personally. When Snader physically shows them how time traveling works by stepping in and out of the screens, Jeff and Ann are so excited that they actually link arms with the stranger. Moments later, Jeff calls him \u201cbrother\u201d. Jeff initially insists that they take his car to go to the station, but when it disappears outside after they have time traveled, they have no problem getting into the backseat of a limousine and allowing Snader to drive them. When he brings them to a building they have never seen before, they wonder what could possibly be dangerous about it instead of insisting that they remain vigilant. Snader delivers Jeff and Ann right to the bad guys, and they never see it coming. Bullen\u2019s guys thank Snader and mention the payment he will receive as a result of bringing them their victim, Jeff. Had Jeff and Ann refused to trust a stranger with a wild story about time traveling, they would not be stuck in another dimension. \n\n"}
{"id": "51167_5", "pid": "51167_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between the Elliotts and Mr. Snader?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Elliotts are always somewhat suspicious of Mr. Snader, but they are intrigued by his claims and offer of time travel and curious enough to want to find out more about it. Snader uses Ann to draw the couple\u2019s initial interest; she is more open to listening to him than Jeff is. Jeff is somewhat antagonistic to Snader, for example, commenting on the misspelled words on his business card and sometimes speaking to him derisively. Likewise, Snader mocks Jeff with his eyes. Ann is more open to Snader\u2019s offer, asking him questions to learn more about it and commenting she wishes time travel could be true. Her receptiveness ignites Jeff\u2019s desire to escape his worries for a while so that he is willing to learn more from Snader. When Snader takes them to the station, Ann expresses concerns to Jeff, but he believes they won\u2019t be in danger. However, when Snader shows Jeff the screens and waves to people on them who wave back, the Elliotts are more convinced that what Snader offers is real. Snader is his nicest to Jeff just before they enter the time travel screen, but the closer they get to the apartment building, the less interested he is in answering questions and being polite. He orders them into the limousine and at one point issues a warning: \u201cTonight, you look where you are going.\u201d Ann notices the station house has bars on it, and Jeff is suspicious enough that he makes a point of remembering the street names where the station is located so they will be able to find it again on their own. His tentative trust of Snader continues eroding when he realizes they are on a freeway that didn\u2019t exist yet in the present. When he asks Snader if he\u2019s brought them to the future instead of the past, Snader doesn\u2019t even bother to answer. At the apartment, Jeff and Ann learn that Snader was paid to bring them there, and he \u201cmockingly\u201d waves at them as he leaves now that his job is done.\n\n\n"}
{"id": "51167_5", "pid": "51167_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nButterfly 9\n \n \n By DONALD KEITH\n \n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer\u2014one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\n \n\n\n I\n \n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n \n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper.\"\n \n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n \n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n \n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n \n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the mustachioed man at the next table.\n \n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n \n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n \n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n \n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n \n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just in the mood.\"\n \n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n \n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand.\"\n \n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n\"But since we can't\u2014\"\n \n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n \n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall.\n \n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n \n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n\"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five years. Maybe I help you.\"\n \n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n \n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952. Is that what you really mean?\"\n \n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n \n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home.\"\n \n \n\n \n Ann laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a psycho\u2014but sort of an inspired one.\"\n \n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you.\"\n \n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n \n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n \n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n \n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n \n \n 4-D TRAVEL BEURO Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n \n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even spells it different.\"\n \n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n \n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n \n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n \n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force.\n \n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n \n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n \n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?\"\n \n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n \n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?\"\n \n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n \n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n \n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n \n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was Elliott?\n \n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n \n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n \n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n \n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here.\"\n \n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything.\"\n \n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness\u2014a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car.\"\n \n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like grace of his short, broad body.\n \n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got some gimmick.\"\n \n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n\"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n \n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n \n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n \n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n\"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect.\"\n \n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n \n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n \n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them.\n \n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens\u2014or were they giant television screens?\u2014occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n \n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante , and to the right with the word Post .\n \n \n\n \n Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n \n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it for?\"\n \n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n \n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I suppose?\"\n \n \n\n \n Instead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back.\n \n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n \n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n \n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past.\n \n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work.\"\n \n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n \n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n \n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n \n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n \n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n \n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n \n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n \n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader\u2014and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n \n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here.\"\n \n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n \n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\n \n \n\n \n Jeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n \n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n \n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again.\n \n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice through the looking-glass.\"\n \n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n \n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to figure it out yet.\"\n \n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n \n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long\u2014how many years back are you taking us?\"\n \n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to stop.\"\n \n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be real, we could see him again.\"\n \n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would\u2014\"\n \n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered 724.\n \n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n \n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\n \n \n\n \n Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n \n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\n \n \n\n \n Snader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n \n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n \n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n \n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n \n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine.\n \n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n \n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n \n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n \n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now.\"\n \n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled us. We're still in 1957.\"\n \n \"You are? Look around.\"\n \n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house.\n \n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n \n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car.\n \n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n \n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n \n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n \n \"What about it?\"\n \n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows.\"\n \n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And the street\u2014\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n\"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957\u2014nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n \n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n \n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n \n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n \n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n \n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n \n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him from a fork in the freeway.\n \n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift\u2014\"\n \n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n \n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's have some answers before we go any further.\"\n \n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n \n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n \n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there.\"\n \n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\n \n \n\n \n A tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily.\n \n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n \n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name\u2014Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott.\"\n \n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n \n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n \n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n \n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n \n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n \n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n \n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?\"\n \n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n \n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back.\"\n \n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n \n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?\"\n \n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n \n \"Exactly. You are an expert in\u2014ah\u2014colored television, I think.\"\n \n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n \n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n \n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!\"\n \n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n \n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your knowledge.\"\n \n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n \n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. But he put on a bold front.\n \n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n \n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here\u2014Butterfly 9, ask for Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon.\"\n \n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n \n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n \n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics\u2014or practical jokers.\" He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n \n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n \n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are dressed\u2014it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n \n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n \n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers\u2014though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n \n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n \n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n \n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills.\n \n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n \n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n\"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n \n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n \n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you want? This is all I have.\"\n \n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n \n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n \n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\n \n \n\n \n The officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n \n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n\"I\u2014uh\u2014got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n \n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n \n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?\"\n \n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?\"\n \n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n \n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n \n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen.\n \n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n \n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n \n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do\u2014more or less\u2014but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n \n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n \n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n \n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n \n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n \n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated.\n \n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n \n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n \n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n \n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n \n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here.\"\n \n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday\u2014you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does\u2014and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n \n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n \n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865\u2014which is most easily done\u2014you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war.\"\n \n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n \n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?\"\n \n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n \n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space\u2014say, a lake in the mountains\u2014how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n \n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship like between the Elliotts and Mr. Snader?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29431, "query_start_index": 29433, "query_end_index": 29509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between the Elliotts and Mr. Snader is one with varying levels of distrust and suspicion but also some curiosity and genuine interest. When they all meet, Jeff is suspicious of everything that Mr. Snader says and does not thing it is worth his time to listen to Snader talk. Ann is curious, though, and wants to hear Snader out. It is not clear from this first part of the story what Snader thinks of the Elliots besides his interest in them as people who might be able to benefit from what he has to offer, at least on the surface. Once they all arrive at the \"4-D Travel Beuro\", as Ann has agreed to give Snader's time travel a try, the suspicion is continued. Because Jeff is an expert in color television, he is convinced everything he is seeing is some kind of visual trick and he wants to learn how it works. Jeff lets this color his interactions with Snader, and most of what he says to him has some audible distrust. At this point, Ann is also worried, once they step into the moving picture, but her fear dissipates once they are outside of the house in a different time. During this time travel, Jeff and Ann have had a lot of questions for Snader, but he is not answering any of them, at least not directly--this adds to the mistrust felt by the Elliotts. Once Snader drops the Elliots off with Kersey, they are understandably upset when they realize they have been tricked."}
{"id": "62260_1", "pid": "62260_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30249, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Isobar Jones\u2019 first call of the day was from Dome Commander Colonel Eagon telling him to deliver his weather reports to Riley Sparks, the Terra contact, ASAP. He works diligently but is soon called again, this time by Eagon\u2019s niece who wants to know about the weather in a certain sector. Shyly, he answers then quickly finished his work. Sparks calls him and asks him to bring his reports to him, as well as informing him that Roberts and Browns were sent Outside for repair work. Sparks makes fun of Isobar\u2019s bagpipes. \nIn Sparks\u2019 office, Isobar delivers his work then waits for him to make the call. Once he\u2019s delivered the report, Sparks asks the Earthman to turn his microphone around. As he does so, the video changes from his face to that of Earth, beautiful trees, and green grass. Isobar is grateful to Sparks and tells him so. They talk about Isobar\u2019s homesickness until Colonel Eagon walks in to hear them discussing the Outisde. He quickly shuts it down and informs Isobar that it is now forbidden for him to play his bagpipe, due to the horrendous noise. Beyond frustrated, Isobar runs back to his rooms, grabs his bagpipes, and sneaks his way Outside by tricking the patrolman. Once he\u2019s breathing in the thin air, he calms down and makes his way two miles out from the gate. Suddenly, he hears the sound of a gun and is brought back to reality. Roberts and Brown rush into view, both injured but grateful to see him, thinking he answered their distress call. However, he didn\u2019t bring an armored tank with him, only a pair of bagpipes. A dozen Granniebacks run behind them, so Isobar helps Roberts and Brown climb a tree to escape. \nThe Grannies are unable to climb trees due to their significant size, but they can tear it down. As they pull and heave on the trunk, Isobar has the idea to play his bagpipes so the Dome will hear it and come looking for them. Roberts thinks it\u2019s a good idea, so he begins to play, and slowly the Grannies all relax and lay down on the ground. They\u2019re all amazed, but when Isobar stops playing, one of the Grannies starts to move again. He plays his entire repertoire and more before the armored tank arrives. The men from the dome reveal that the Grannies are dead, and the sound of the bagpipes must be what killed them. Isobar saved the team. \n"}
{"id": "62260_1", "pid": "62260_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30249, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Horatio \"Isobar\" Jones lives and works in the Experimental Dome at Lunar III, a frontier outpost functioning as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point, and meteorological base on Luna, Earth's moon. As a meteorologist forecasting weather for Earth, Isobar owes daily weather reports to Dome Commander Colonel Eagan, whose niece he also advises on forecasts for her personal travels. Isobar receives a call from his associate \"Sparks\" Riley, who manages communications with Earth in the Dome's transmission turret. Isobar tells \"Sparks\" he is about to bring him the report, and \"Sparks\" implores him to leave behind his bagpipe, the only item that brings Isobar any joy in the Dome. He also informs Isobar that the maintenance men Roberts and Brown have gone Outside to make foundation repairs to the Dome. Isobar gets jealous when he hears this, and when \"Sparks\" makes his call to Earth, Isobar asks him to request the Earth radioman to twist his mike so he can get a glimpse of Earth's nature that he misses so much. When Commander Eagan enters the room, he informs Isobar that he must stop playing his bagpipe, as the sounds travel through the air-conditioning system and disturb the other workers. Indignant, Isobar says he will go Outside the Dome, which is forbidden due to the existence of the Granitebacks, called \"Grannies\"--a fast-moving native species with impenetrable, protective carapaces known to kill humans. Eagan doubles down on his commands, and an angry Isobar returns to his quarters. In his absence, \"Sparks\" converses with Dr. Loesch, who diagnoses Isobar with \"weltschmertz\"--a deep world-weariness that makes the sufferer resort to radical acts in order to feel happiness. At the same time, Isobar takes his bagpipes, tricks the Junior Patrolman attending to the impervite gates, and goes outside to feel the sunlight on his face, breathe fresh air, and play his bagpipes in peace. Outside, Isobar walks several miles away from the entrance to the Dome, where he stumbles upon Roberts and Brown, who are injured and running away from a hostile group of Grannies. Because no weapons can pierce the thick carapaces of the Grannies, the men scurry up a nearby tree adjacent to \"Sparks'\" transmission turret. When the Grannies begin attacking the tree, the men believe they will die; however, Isobar decides to play his bagpipes, hoping the music will alert \"Sparks\" to their dilemma by way of the air-conditioning vent. As Isobar plays, the men notice the Grannies seem to be entranced by the music. Isobar continues to play until help arrives, and they all realize the music has actually killed the Grannies."}
{"id": "62260_1", "pid": "62260_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30249, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Horatio Jones, known as Isobar, is ready to report the weather to the Dome Commander, Colonel Eagen. Isobar is stationed on the moon at Lunar III.  His job involves reporting the weather forecasts for Earth. When he signed up to be part of the Frontier Service, he expected an exciting adventure, but his life for the last six months has been boring. Isobar especially hates the stale air that he must breathe every day. \n\nWhen Isobar\u2019s coworker Riley makes contact with Earth\u2019s radioman, Isobar hangs around and begs him to ask the operator for a glimpse of Earth. He obliges. The grass, birds, and flowers make Isobar even more homesick. Riley says that there\u2019s plenty of foliage to look at outside on the moon, but Isobar complains that he isn\u2019t allowed to venture Outside. It\u2019s too dangerous to leave the station because the Granitebacks, also known as Grannies, are ready to attack at any moment. In fact, Brown and Roberts are currently risking their lives to make repairs to the building. The Grannies are creatures that appear to be made of rock. They are not very intelligent, but they have exoskeletons harder than diamonds, and their speed allows them to take down humans in a matter of seconds.\n\nIsobar\u2019s only pleasure is playing his bagpipe, and he has been informed that all instruments are banned. Isobar offers to go Outside to play his bagpipes, but he\u2019s reminded that no one is allowed to leave the station unless it\u2019s absolutely necessary.\n\nRiley sees Isobar is angry,, and he gets a kick out of it. On the other hand, Dr. Loesch, an older physicist, feels sorry for Isobar. He argues that Isobar is suffering from weltschmertz, or weariness of the world. Some men with the condition commit suicide while others rebel in unforeseen ways. He\u2019s right because Isobar is lying to the guard so that he can go Outside and play his bagpipes.\n\nIsobar feels the warm air, and he is instantly happy. A short time later, he hears a pistol go off, and he sees Roberts and Brown. They believe he has received their calls for help, but that isn\u2019t the case. The men are being chased by a dozen Grannies, and Isobar instructs them to climb up a tree. The group of Grannies begin to hurl their bodies at the tree like a battering ram. The three men believe they are about to die. Isobar decides to play his bagpipes to get his colleagues\u2019 attention. As soon as the music begins, the Grannies stop attacking. Although the men believe the Grannies are deaf, they appear to be laying down on the ground, unmoving, to listen. Eventually, an armored tank comes to rescue the men, and Isobar passes out from playing the pipes so fervently. The Grannies, it turns out, were killed by the music\n"}
{"id": "62260_1", "pid": "62260_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30249, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Horatio Jones (also called Isobar or Jonesy) is a meteorological forecaster at the Experimental Dome on Luna stationed within a hemispheric dome called Lunar III. He had spent six months there and would not get to go home for at least another six. It was a desolate place that only served as a rocket refueling station, transmission center, and meteorological base.\nIsobar is crunching the data to write a new weather report to be delivered to his colleagues Sparks and Riley to transmit to the station on Earth. After delivering the report, he lingers in the transmission tower, desperately wanting to get a peek at Earth during the video transmission of his work to Earth. The receiving person on Earth complies and turns the video feed around the room so that they get a view out of the window to the outdoors on Earth with green grass and people enjoying the day. \nIsobar reveals he longs to experience the flowers and trees again to his colleagues. There is a place that this can be done on Luna, in another adjacent hemispheric dome called \u201cOutside\u201d that contains a lush valley, but this is strictly forbidden other than absolute necessities for things like repairs due to extremely dangerous beasts called Granitebacks (Grannies). Dome Commander Eagan overhears Isobar\u2019s admissions, becoming serious about how under no circumstances is he to go Outside or to play the bagpipes because the sound transmits to everyone through the air conditioning system. Seeing an opportunity for himself, Horatio suggests he go Outside to play his beloved bagpipes, citing that two of his colleagues (Brown and Roberts) are also Outside conducting orders. The Commander is steadfast in his decision and strictly forbids Isobar from going outside.\nHoratio returns to his room and immediately takes the bagpipes and goes Outside by convincing the patrol guard there were orders for him to take his post while he reports to general headquarters. He is enthralled by the lush life in the hemisphere, and wanders a great distance from the gates until he is underneath of Sparks\u2019 radio turret and hears the loud firing of a Haemholtz ray pistol. Brown and Roberts are being attacked by a group of Grannies, and have radioed the Dome for help with no response. Isobar is helpless to assist other than suggesting they all climb a tree. To their luck, the Grannies can\u2019t climb, but they start ramming the tree until it is obvious that they will all die up there soon once they knock it over and devour them. \nIsobar starts playing the bagpipes to alert the attention of Sparks in the tower above them. He is successful in getting the attention of Sparks who comes with a tank to rescue them, but even more amazingly the bagpipe music has killed all the of the Grannies at the base of the tree. Isobar saves the day with the bagpipe music everyone in the Dome hates.\n"}
{"id": "62260_2", "pid": "62260_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the bagpipes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The bagpipes are Isobar\u2019s one relief and a reminder of home. Isobar Jones hates his new job and position on Luna III and plays the bagpipes as a form of therapy. When they are taken away from him, he quickly revolts and rushes Outside to play once more. \nThough the bagpipes are initially only significant to Isobar, they quickly become the savior of the whole story. After Roberts and Brown run into Isobar, followed by Grannies, they climb a tree and hope for the best. Isobar plays the bagpipes as a way to alert those in the dome that they are outside, seeing as the air conditioning valve was near. However, as it turns out, the Grannies are able to hear, and the sound of the bagpipes slowly but surely killed them. The bagpipes saved Isobar\u2019s life in multiple ways, as well as that of Roberts and Brown. They also proved to be a scientific breakthrough, as they are the only thing to ever kill a Grannie. \n"}
{"id": "62260_2", "pid": "62260_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the bagpipes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The bagpipes are Isobar's most cherished possession. Six months into his one-year term at Lunar III, Isobar begins to experience extreme homesickness, and he begins to loathe the artificial air-conditioning of the Experimental Dome as well as the rule against going Outside because of the threat of the \"Grannies.\" To keep himself sane, Isobar plays the bagpipes. However, the loud sound disturbs the other workers in the organization, and soon Commander Eagan orders Isobar to cease playing the bagpipes for the rest of his term. This causes Isobar to rebel, and he leaves the Dome against orders to play his bagpipes in peace. Once Outside, Isobar discovers Roberts and Brown are under attack by a group of Grannies, and he plays his bagpipes to try to alert \"Sparks\" that they are cornered up a tree. As a result of Isobar's music, the men discover the sound of the bagpipes not only calms the Grannies, but it also eventually kills them. Therefore, Isobar's insistence on playing the bagpipes leads to the discovery of a solid defense against the humans' primary threat on Luna."}
{"id": "62260_2", "pid": "62260_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the bagpipes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Isobar is miserable while stationed at the Lunar III, and playing his bagpipes is the only pastime he has that he truly enjoys. He has been part of the Frontier Service for six months, and he regrets leaving Earth and the beautiful landscape to sit in a bubble day after day and breathe recycled air. His colleagues hate his music, and it\u2019s difficult to stop the sounds from emanating all over the station because of the air conditioning vents. When he refuses to stop playing on multiple occasions, his Dome Commander institutes General Order 17, which is a ban on all musical instruments. Isobar does not take this news very well. He can\u2019t suppress his anger at this news after being disappointed and depressed for a long stretch of time. Isobar argues that he should be able to go Outside and play, but of course that\u2019s off-limits. The Grannies would almost surely attack him, and he\u2019s forbidden from leaving unless it\u2019s absolutely necessary. Isobar decides to ignore the rules because playing the bagpipes is what truly makes him happy. He tells the guard that\u2019s working at the door to the Outside that he\u2019s been sent to take his place. Instead of watching for Roberts and Brown, however, he slips outside with his pipes. After he sees his colleagues being attacked by the Grannies, he completely forgets about his instrument, but it\u2019s a good thing that Roberts asks him about it, because the bagpipes actually save the trio\u2019s lives. Isobar decides to play his instrument to alert his coworkers about the trouble he and Roberts and Brown are in, but by the time help arrives, they no longer need it. The Grannies are killed by the music, the one thing that all the humans hated with a passion. "}
{"id": "62260_2", "pid": "62260_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the bagpipes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30260, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Isobar loves to play the bagpipes, but is discouraged by his colleagues, like when Sparks tells him not to bring them with the forecast he is delivering to him because of his sensitive eardrums. Doodlesack is the word his colleagues Riley and Sparks call the bagpipes to tease him. Later in the story, the Dome Commander Eagan actually cites a new rule he has made that practising musical instruments must be discontinued immediately by dome staff because the sound travels through the air conditioning system and annoys people. \nAfter Isobar smuggles the bagpipes Outside to play them and gets swept up in an near-death attack by the Grannies with Brown and Roberts that has them stuck up a tree waiting to die, his colleagues continue to tease him by saying they can\u2019t even die in peace since he'll be playing the bagpipes.\nAlthough Isobar\u2019s intention was to get help to come rescue them by playing the bagpipes and alerting Sparks in the nearby control tower to their danger with their loud sound, the story ends in an amazing twist instead. The bagpipe music is the only thing known to be capable of killing the Grannies. All the Grannies at the base of the tree layed down and died when the music was played, and Isobar\u2019s hated musical instrument saves the day.\nMore than this, the Grannies are a barrier to humans being able to advance their colony on Luna, so Isobar\u2019s discovery that the bagpipes are lethal might be an important key for progress.\n"}
{"id": "62260_3", "pid": "62260_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Grannies, or Granitebacks.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30258, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Granitebacks are huge creatures that live on Luna III. Their immense size, hulking form, and impenetrable body make them practically indestructible. As of the beginning of this story, no Grannie had ever been killed. It was also believed that they were unable to hear, lacking ear canals, and potentially intelligence. Their exoskeleton or carapace was impenetrable, even harder than diamond or steel. Each weapon the Earthman devised to use against the Grannies failed. However, at the end of the story, it\u2019s revealed that Grannies can, in fact, hear and are deeply affected by the sounds of the bagpipe. Isobar\u2019s playing kills them all within 10 minutes and allows him and his companions to escape safe and sound. "}
{"id": "62260_3", "pid": "62260_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Grannies, or Granitebacks.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30258, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Granitebacks, colloquially referred to as the \"Grannies\", are the only mobile form of life found on Luna, and were named by the first explorers of the moon. Although the Grannies have low intelligence, they are a deadly threat to humans. They move fast for their size and weight, and their bodies are covered with impervious exoskeletons impenetrable even by humans' most sophisticated technologies. Isobar does not fear them because they haven't been seen around the Dome in quite a long time. However, when Roberts and Brown run afoul of a hostile group of them during a routine maintenance run Outside, they take shelter with Isobar up a tree, knowing that none of their weapons can defend against the Grannies. The Grannies attack as a group, throwing their hard bodies against the tree, which bends and dents upon impact. When Isobar plays his bagpipes, the men learn that Grannies can be lulled and ultimately killed by the sounds emitted from that instrument. "}
{"id": "62260_3", "pid": "62260_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Grannies, or Granitebacks.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30258, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Grannies, also known as Granitebacks, are mobile creatures that live on the moon, and they are highly dangerous to humans. The people working at Lunar III are not allowed to venture Outside because the Grannies will attack with little notice or reason. They are described as rocks on legs, which is where their moniker came from. The Grannies are not highly intelligent creatures, but intelligence isn\u2019t necessary when they have exoskeletons made of incredibly strong material that can\u2019t be wounded by steel or fire. Their exteriors are stronger than diamonds, steel, or any other known material to humans. Due to their immense weight, the Grannies cannot climb trees, so Isobar\u2019s plan to climb to avoid them is a great move. However, the creatures work in packs, and about a dozen of them begin hurling their bodies at the tree at the same time, and this breaks the tree\u2019s trunk. The men believe that the Grannies are deaf, but that turns out to be incorrect information. So far, the humans have not found a single weapon that works to fight against the Grannies.  Isobar\u2019s discovery that the music he creates with the bagpipes actually kills the Grannies is literally lifesaving. "}
{"id": "62260_3", "pid": "62260_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Grannies, or Granitebacks.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30258, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Granitebacks (Grannies) are deadly beasts of low intelligence - the only life form found on Luna - so named because they are indestructibly impervious to human weapons. Their biology is a mystery to science because one has never been killed so it can be studied in a laboratory. All that is known is that their outer shell is harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate. \nOne weakness of the Grannies is that they are unable to climb, which is how Isobar, Roberts and Brown escape their land attack by climbing a tree in the Outside dome. However, the Grannies are exceptionally strong, capable of uprooting a tree large enough to hold three adult men. Ultimately, the thing that kills Grannies is bagpipe music, which causes them to lay down and die.\n"}
{"id": "62260_4", "pid": "62260_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30252, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Trouble on Tycho takes place on Luna III, a new frontier for space technology. The planet itself is lush and green, with a beautiful network of trees and greenery. However, it is inhabited by Granitebacks, an unbeatable foe known to kill any Earthmen who dare cross their path. So, the new inhabitants of Luna III built a giant dome to keep themselves safe from the Grannies, at least until they devised a way to beat them. The dome allows its residents to see out but makes it very difficult for them to escape. The inhabitants are there to provide Earth with news from space as well as other meteorological forecasts. The dome has air-conditioning and thick glass walls, so there\u2019s no fresh air or real sunlight, only the meager, filtered kind. "}
{"id": "62260_4", "pid": "62260_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30252, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Earth's moon, Luna. Since the first Lunar expedition, humans have established Lunar III, a frontier outpost that operates as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point, and meteorological base. Resting in a lunar valley rich with grass, flowers, insects, sunlight, trees, and fresh air, the outpost is comprised of several domes, including the Experimental Dome from which Isobar Jones observes and reports weather on Earth. The Dome has a transmission turret, operated by Sparks Riley, which allows communication with Earth, and the atmosphere of the entire outpost is controlled with atmo-conditioning units reoxygenating the air. Isobar plays his bagpipes locked inside his office, but everyone in the Dome can hear him thanks to the air-conditioning system that can't be shut off. To prevent people from leaving and to protect against the Granitebacks, massive impervite gates protect the entrance to the Dome. The moon's only mobile, native species are the Granitebacks, called \"Grannies\", who are dangerous to humans and have bodies protected by thick exoskeletons impenetrable to any known weapon."}
{"id": "62260_4", "pid": "62260_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30252, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\u201cTrouble on Tycho\u201d is set on Earth\u2019s moon, and it mostly takes place on Lunar III, a frontier outpost which is used for rocket refueling, teleradio transmission, and meteorological observances. There are airtight domes in the station that make Isobar feel like a goldfish in a glass bowl. The sunlight is filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so the workers\u2019 skin does not get burnt, and this makes them very pale. The air is constantly recycled through atmo-conditioning units, and it\u2019s anything but fresh. The men who work on Lunar III have beautiful views to take in, but they are not allowed to go Outside. Outside the post is a beautiful valley filled with green foliage and small insects. A warm breeze blows through the flowery meadows. However, the picturesque scenery is ruined by the Granitebacks, or Grannies, that will attack humans without provocation. \n"}
{"id": "62260_4", "pid": "62260_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30252, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in an Experimental Dome on Luna, and the main character, Isobar is stationed within a hemispheric dome unit called Lunar III. There are separate quarters for the employees and towers for transmitting video and radio signals to Earth. Sunlight is filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps, which leaves Isobars skin pale and clammy. The air is scented and reoxygenated and is pumped in through atmo-conditioning units. Isobar has been stationed there for six months, and will be there for at least six more, leading to a kind of disdain for these features.\nIn the transmission tower that communicates with Earth there are desks like a typical broadcasting office and a plate on the wall that projects the video from Earth. Out the window on the Earth side of the video feed, there is blue sky, trees, birds, flowers, and people. \nThere is an \u201cOutside\u201d hemispherical dome which houses a lush valley adjacent to the air conditioned living quarters the employees are confined to, and guarded under heavy gates. \u201cOutside\u201d is warm with thin, fragrant breezes, good sunlight, and abundant forest flora that make Isobar feel replenished after being in the sanitized quarters of the Dome.\n"}
{"id": "62260_5", "pid": "62260_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Isobar Jones and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30284, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Isobar Jones, real name Horatio, has been living on Luna III for six long months now. Working as a meteorologist for Earth and radio operator, he spends his days locked in the Experimental Dome of Luna meant to protect them from the Grannies, the indestructible creatures in the Outside. His only relief comes from playing his bagpipes, but his weariness, homesickness, and blues were catching up to him. \nAfter sending out his forecasts to Earth, Isobar reveals his deep desire to escape the dome and venture Outside. Caught by Colonel Eagon, he is punished by a new commandment stating that no musical instrument can be played as it disturbs the rest of the dome. An ardent player of the bagpipes, he is heartily disappointed and upset by the news. His weariness or weltschmertz as Dr. Loesch called it makes Isobar take his bagpipes Outside the dome so he can play in peace. He tricks the junior station manning the door and slips out once he\u2019s out of sight. After walking for a long time through the beautiful scenery, he hears the sound of a gun firing. Knowing what this means, fear quickly strikes deep inside him. Roberts and Brown come towards him, followed by a dozen Grannies. Isobar helps them climb a tree while explaining that he doesn\u2019t actually have the armored tank they called for. Once there, he explains his idea to them about playing his bagpipes so that the Dome would hear them and come to their rescue. The air conditioning valve was nearby, so the sound would carry. As he begins to play, the Grannies fall to the ground and remain there. Supposedly resting, Isobar keeps playing until backup arrives. They are shocked to find that Isobar\u2019s playing didn\u2019t just put the Grannies to sleep, it actually killed them. Isobar made a huge scientific discovery and rescued his companions. "}
{"id": "62260_5", "pid": "62260_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Isobar Jones and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30284, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Horatio \"Isobar\" Jones is a meteorologist working a one-year term in the Experimental Dome at the Lunar III frontier outpost on Earth's moon, Luna. Isobar is lean and gangly and has a good working relationship with others at the outpost. However, Isobar has begun to miss Earth and the feeling of nature, since it is prohibited to leave the Dome due to the existential threat of the Grannies. He asks Sparks Riley to request the radioman show him the view outside when Sparks calls Earth to relay Isobar's weather report; when Sparks tells him Patrolmen Roberts and Brown have left the Dome to conduct routine maintenance Outside, Isobar feels jealous. He begins to loathe the recycled air in the dome and the clammy feeling it creates on his skin. Isobar becomes easily irritated and lashes out with profanities. Dr. Loesch suggests to Sparks that Isobar is the victim of \"weltschmertz\", an intense kind of world-weariness that can drive a person to extreme measures to feel happiness again. The only activity that brings Isobar joy anymore is playing the bagpipes, which disturbs his co-workers so much that Commander Eagan eventually orders him to stop playing it. This command sends Isobar over the edge, and he tricks Junior Patrolman Wilkins into giving up his post at the entrance gate so that he can leave the Dome and go outside to get some fresh air and play his bagpipes in peace. While he is outside, Isobar runs into Roberts and Brown, who are running away from a group of Grannies. After they take refuge up a tree, Isobar plays his bagpipes in order to signal Sparks for help. In the process, he learns that the music of the bagpipes has a powerful sedative effect upon the Grannies--so much so that it actually kills them."}
{"id": "62260_5", "pid": "62260_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Isobar Jones and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30284, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Isobar Jones\u2019s real name is Horatio. He joined the Frontier Services six months ago because he was eager to go on an adventure on the moon and do something exciting with his life. He is deeply disappointed in his decision because he gets very little joy out of his job. He enjoys making observations about the meteorological patterns on Earth, but he does not like the constant instructions from the Dome Commander. Most of all, he hates being trapped inside without fresh air and the familiar feeling of sunshine warming his skin. He brought his bagpipes to the Lunar III because playing music is one of his favorite hobbies, but his coworkers become annoyed with his incessant playing. There is nowhere for him to go and play that won\u2019t bother others. The music travels through the air conditioning system, and it\u2019s impossible to turn it off. After the Dome Commander receives several complaints, he decides to make a rule forbidding all instruments. Isobar is devastated. He was already feeling depressed and anxious, but prohibiting music is the final straw for him. He devises a plan to go Outside to play his bagpipes, which is strictly forbidden. He knows that there\u2019s a real possibility that he will run into a Graniteback, but he assumes that he can run away from them quickly. After he tricks a guard into leaving his post, he moseys outside and travels two miles away from the gate to the building. There, he encounters Brown and Roberts, who both believe that Isobar has been sent to help them. Their calls to the station have gone unanswered, and they quickly realize that Isobar does not have an armored vehicle. He\u2019s actually equipped with his bagpipes. Isobar\u2019s idea to climb a nearby tree to escape a pack of Grannies buys the men time, and his next idea, to play his instrument to alert their colleagues that they're in need of help, actually saves their lives. Isobar does not intend to kill the Grannies with his music, but they fall to the ground and die after hearing him play. "}
{"id": "62260_5", "pid": "62260_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTROUBLE ON TYCHO\n \n\n By NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n The audiophone buzzed thrice\u2014one long, followed by two shorts\u2014and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n \n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n \n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.\n \n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n \n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese\u2014\"\n \n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n \n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag\u2014?\"\n \n It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. \u2014 Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.\n \n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.\n \n \" Weather forecast for Terra ,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.\n \n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n \n \"I\u2014er\u2014I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n \n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.\n \n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \" You , Miss Sally! Golly\u2014'scuse me! I didn't realize\u2014\"\n \n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n \n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n \n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n \n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n \n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n \n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.\n \n \n\n \n If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones\u2014known better as \"Isobar\" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna\u2014was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III\u2014that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n \n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up in an airtight Dome like\u2014like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n \n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.\n \n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to\u2014Yeah?\"\n \n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n\"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n \n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n \n \"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else.\"\n \n Isobar bridled.\n \n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n \n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n \n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to\u2014\"\n \n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n \n \"Yeah? What?\"\n \n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown\u2014\"\n \n \"What about 'em?\"\n \n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n \n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n \n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe\u2014if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n \n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n \n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n \n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean\u2014Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I\u2014well\u2014er\u2014\"\n \n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n \n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:\n \n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear\u2014?\"\n \n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n \n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.\n \n \"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian\u2014didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 \u2014'\"\n \n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n \n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.\n \n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n \n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.\n \n \"How's that? I didn't say a word\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?\"\n \n \"What? Why\u2014why, yes, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n \n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand\u2014\" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....\n \n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n \n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n \n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n \n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n \n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \" He twisted the mike; not me. But\u2014how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n \n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n \n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n \n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's\u2014well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees.\"\n \n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n \n \"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n \n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside\u2014and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to\u2014\"\n \n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n \n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.\n \n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying\u2014\"\n \n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example\u2014\"\n \n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n \n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n \n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n \n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while\u2014\"\n \n \"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?\"\n \n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\n \n \n\n \n Commander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n \n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think\u2014\"\n \n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!\"\n \n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me\u2014\"\n \n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your\u2014er\u2014so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure.\"\n \n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n \n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own\u2014er\u2014amusement.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" said Isobar.\n \n \"No!\"\n \n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom\u2014\n \n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it\u2014\"\n \n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about the Grannies?\"\n \n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.\n \n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology\u2014but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.\n \n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n \n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders\u2014obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!\"\n \n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish\u2014hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.\n \n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh\u2014 fiddlesticks !\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n \n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.\n \n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar.\"\n \n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to\u2014\"\n \n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n\"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'\u2014something like that but intensified a thousandfold.\n \n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n \n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his buttons?\"\n \n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger\u2014By the way, where is he now?\"\n \n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n \n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n \n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n\"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n \n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.\n \n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n \n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!\"\n \n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.\n \n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n \n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.\n \n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting.\"\n \n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n \n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n \n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n \n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n \n \"Notified of what ?\"\n \n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n \n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?\"\n \n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That\u2014er\u2014won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n \n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like.\"\n \n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.\n \n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!\n \n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....\n \n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.\n \n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear\u2014off to his right\u2014the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.\n \n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n \n And the shooting? That could only be\u2014\n \n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n \n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\n \n \n\n III\n \n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n \n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man\u2014where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n \n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is what ?\"\n \n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and\u2014\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why\u2014?\"\n \n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown\u2014There! That's the stuff!\"\n \n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.\n \n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n \n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n\"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but\u2014\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily\u2014\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!\"\n \n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n \n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked\u2014revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\n \n \n\n \n Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n \n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that\u2014\"\n \n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n \n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out\u2014\"\n \n But Roberts shook his head.\n \n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n \n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n \n \"Then I\u2014I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is\u2014\"\n \n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n \n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!\"\n \n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just happened to\u2014Oh! the pipes! \"\n \n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n \n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.\n \n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things\u2014\"\n \n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again, excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, \" Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! \"\n \n Roberts moaned.\n \n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n \n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n \n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven\u2014\"\n \n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n \n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome\u2014but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n \n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here\u2014\"\n \n \" Stop talking! \" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! \"\n \n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\n \n \n Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\n \n\n \n He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.\n \n \" Haa-a-roong! \" blew Isobar Jones.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n And\u2014even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action\u2014the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n \n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!\n \n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.\n \n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n \n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen\u2014like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n \n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.\n \n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n \n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not\u2014and in two cases dared not\u2014allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances\u2014the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.\n  The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and\u2014\n \n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n \n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!\"\n \n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n \n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n \n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies\u2014they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!\"\n \n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n \n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres\u2014 those Grannies are stone dead !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Isobar Jones and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30207, "query_start_index": 30209, "query_end_index": 30284, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Isobar Jones (real name, Horatio Jones, also referred to in the story as Isobar or Jonesy) is a meteorological forecaster stationed on Luna. He has been there for six months, and is developing a kind of stir-craziness from the sterile living environment and being forbidden from his one true joy - playing the bagpipes. Dr. Loesch claims he has a sickness called weltschmertz, which is a dangerous mental condition of \u201cworld sickness\u201d that can make a person do wild things.\nIsobar delivers a weather forecast to the transmission tower early in the story where he begs his colleague to have the Earth receiver person turn the video feed around to their window. This demonstrates how much Isobars longs for the outdoors that a video feed out a window on Earth soothes him. He is strictly forbidden from playing the bagpipes or from going \u201cOutside\u201d to the adjacent hemispheric dome that houses a lush valley by the Dome Commander Eagan. Being overcome with his desire for both the bagpipes and to go Outside, Isobar defies orders, tricks a guard into leaving his post, and sets into the lush Outside. It is deeply restorative for him, but he is snapped to reality when he discovers his colleagues, Brown and Roberts, are being attacked by Grannies. \nIsobar is helpless to assist them other than suggesting they all climb a tree. To their luck, the Grannies can\u2019t climb, but they start ramming the tree until it is obvious that they will all die up there soon once they knock it over and devour them. Isobar starts playing the bagpipes to alert the attention of Sparks in the tower above them. He is successful in getting the attention of Sparks who comes with a tank to rescue them, but even more amazingly his bagpipe music has killed all the of the Grannies at the base of the tree. \nIsobar becomes the hero of the story, since his bagpipe music is the first thing known to be capable of killing the Grannies, which will allow humans to now study them and perhaps make advancements to their settlement on Luna. \n"}
{"id": "32667_1", "pid": "32667_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20790, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The setting is primarily at an event space called the Space Room. Jimmie Stanley and his band perform there. They are sitting in the cocktail lounge waiting for the replacement for their fiddle player to arrive. Their boss, Ke-teeli, is upset that the fiddle player is not yet there. He is threatening to not let them play at the venue anymore. Eventually, their replacement player arrives at the venue. However, Jimmie has serious doubts that man will be able to play well because his instrument does not look like a fiddle and he appears disheveled. When the band does play with the new member, John Smith, he and his instrument \u2013 the Zloomph \u2013 sounds amazing. The audience shows a good reception as does the boss. \n\nJimmie wants John to join the band, but John has other concerns. He continuously mentions holes and seems obsessed over finding holes. Eventually, Jimmie learns why John is interested in holes. John claims that he accidentally went through a hole and left his time dimension. He is in search of holes in order to find his original time dimension. Jimmie attempts to play along with John\u2019s claims and even offers to let John stay at his apartment in order to entice him to join the band. John continues to drink beer and talk about holes during the story. \n\nOne night, Jimmie returns back to his apartment and finds John drunk on the floor. He takes John, and the instrument, outside to calm John down. When they go outside, John and his instrument fall through a hole and are not seen again. Jimmie and the rest of the band assume that John managed to find his way back to his own time zone.  \n"}
{"id": "32667_1", "pid": "32667_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20790, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jimmie Stanley is the piano player in a band, and the story begins at The Space Room where the band is waiting for a temporary bass fiddle man to arrive. This is because the original bass fiddle man, Ziggy, injured his fingers. The boss Ke-teeli does not seem to like their music that much. Now that a member is missing and the replacement player has not yet arrived, the boss starts to doubt that the three members of the band can perform good music. He doesn\u2019t think that the customers will be satisfied. The band\u2019s contract with the boss ends this week, and the boss does not seem to want to continue the contract. Finally, the temporary bass fiddle player arrives with his instrument. He introduces himself as John Smith and tells them that he is late because he was working on his plan. At first, Jimmie doubt that the ancient bass fiddle can make any beautiful sound. But he becomes very surprised once he hears the beautiful music. The audiences are focused and intrigued by the music. Even the boss becomes delight after hearing the music. Later, John begins to notice the holes on the clarinet and the piano, which seems quite odd to the band. Noting his talents in music and the facial expression on the boss\u2019 face, Jimmie asks John to play for the long term. But John rejects stating that he needs to work on his plan. John mentions that there are many holes in the universe, but he cannot find the right one to go back to prove a point to the University. Believing that Jimmie understands him, he decides to play with the band. The boss agrees to give them the contract if John stays. For the next few days, John becomes popular and then a reporter come to interview him. After telling the reporter about the holes, the reporter decides to leave. Then John tells the band that he will stay until tomorrow. The next day, John is gone. The band searched everywhere, but is not able to find him. "}
{"id": "32667_1", "pid": "32667_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20790, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "An Earth music band of four is supposed to play at The Space Room on Mars, but the bass man is injured. The band boss, Ke-teeli, is discontented with the group and won't prolong the contract, he wants to cancel the concert. Jimmie Stanley, the leader of the band, is waiting for the bass man's replacement to save the band. If the band loses the job, they have nowhere to go. After a while of waiting, a huge monstrosity enters The Space Room accompanied by a little guy in a suit, a matchstick. The newcomer is John Smith, the bass man from Mars, who is late because he has been working on his plan of getting back home. When the band starts playing, everyone is enchanted with John's playing, which is the best and the most unique sound they've ever heard. During the intermission, John mentions that his fiddle is over five thousand years old but its hole isn't right for going home. Jimmie is confused with this and the band continues playing. John stares at the holes in the instruments of the rest of the band. At intermission Jimmie offers John a drink to urge him to join the band. John is unwilling to accept the offer as he is more interested in history and his plan than in music. Turns out he fell into a hole a while ago and now he can't get back to his time dimension. For three days John plays with the band and talks of holes to Jimmie, whom he sees as an understanding person. Then John is interviewed and the reporter won't listen about his holes, so he decides to quit the band and continue searching for them. Next day Jimmie leaves for a while thinking about how to urge the bass man to stay, and when he returns, John is drunk with beer. The two go out and suddenly John disappears. The band can't find him anywhere and their contract ends. \n"}
{"id": "32667_1", "pid": "32667_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20790, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on a Saturday night at The Space Room. Jimmie Stanley and two other members of his band are sitting in the bandstand of the cocktail lounge. The bass fiddle man, Ziggy, is not present because he had almost sliced his fingers off while opening a can of Santurnian ice-fish. The boss Ke-teeli, also known as Goon-Face, is furious that no music is being played at the establishment. They explain that a Marsport local has been called a stand-in for the bassist, while Ke-teeli is suspicious. John Smith from the Marsport union comes in shortly after. Jimmie is intimidated by his bass fiddle, and John Smith explains that he knows how to play everything. As they begin playing, John Smith plays a whole chord with each beat on his bass. The customers are in some trance, and even bland-faced Martians begin nodding in time to the rhythm. After their performance, John Smith explains that his instrument is over five thousand years old, and it is not a fiddle but the only Zloomph in existence. He points out the holes on the other band member\u2019s instruments. Jimmie tries to convince him to join the combo, but John explains that he does not care much for playing even when Jimmie offers to share his apartment. He is focused on his plan, which involves studying holes and how they relate to the universe. John further explains that he fell through his time dimension while hurrying back to the University with his Zloomph to prove something in ancient history. Jimmie agrees to listen to him if he plays with them, which makes John extremely happy. John becomes extremely popular with all of the customers, and Goon-Face tells Jimmie that they will continue to have their contract if the bass fiddle man stays. A reporter approaches John for an interview over beer, and he tries to tell him his plan. However, it turns out that the reporter does not understand, and John is down again. Fat Boy exclaims that they are also working on a plan in an attempt to make him stay. As Jimmie thinks about what can make John stay, he comes up with a variety of plans. As he returns to his apartment in the early afternoon, he finds John squatting on the floor and surrounded by beer bottles. John is scared because he is covered in holes, but Jimmie is not convinced and takes him out to get some fresh air. It is four AM in the morning; suddenly, John disappears through the manhole with his Zloomph. Jimmie jumps into it after him, but he has completely disappeared without a trace. Goon-Face does not offer them another contract, and they desperately search everywhere for John. Ziggy, now healed, signs up for a trip to the uranium pits, and Jimmie is furious at whoever let John back to his time dimension. However, he knows that they cannot sue the city without a corpus delecti. "}
{"id": "32667_2", "pid": "32667_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is John Smith interested in holes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Smith is interested in holes because he wants to go back to his own time dimension. He explains to Jimmie that his colleagues did not believe that before the tapes, instruments that played music existed. He further details that on his way back to the University with his instrument, the Zloomph, he fell through a hole and out of his own time dimension. He states that a researcher is to blame for not securing a force field over the hole to prevent someone from falling through. John Smith is interested in holes because he believes that any hole could potentially bring him back to his own time dimension so that he can prove that this theory was credit. He does not want people to think that he was wrong. "}
{"id": "32667_2", "pid": "32667_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is John Smith interested in holes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "He is interested in the holes because he needs to find the correct one in order to go home. He mentions that the foundation of their cultures is based on the history of all the time dimensions. The different dimensions are interwoven and the holes can provide insights into the different dimensions. Similar to time or space travel. Back in his time, he was proving a point to the University, but some researcher forgot to set a force-field for the hole, thus, he fell through the hole into Jimmie\u2019s time. He needs to go back immediately. If he doesn\u2019t, the University will think that he cannot prove his theory and ran away. But because everything are made up of holes \u2013 even his body has holes \u2013 John becomes worried of not able to find the correct one. "}
{"id": "32667_2", "pid": "32667_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is John Smith interested in holes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Smith desperately wants to return home and believes that finding the right hole is the way. There are many time dimensions interwoven through the ages and the holes let people travel between and study them. Such a hole may be anything, so it's almost impossible to find the inter-dimensional one. John fell into one in the dark in his dimension, that way he showed up in this place, but he wants to return, so he studies every hole. The fall prevented John from proving his point about ancient history to some scientists and he doesn't want them to consider him a coward. He needs to return to his dimension and prove the point. "}
{"id": "32667_2", "pid": "32667_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is John Smith interested in holes?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Smith is interested in holes because he believes that he can return to his time dimension through the right one. During his conversation with Jimmie, he explains that holes are a first-hand method of studying time dimensions and cultures. All of the objects around them, including the beer bottles, doors, caves, animal holes, mines, faces, and clothes, all have millions of holes. However, even with all of these holes, John is desperate because he cannot find the right one to return home. He blames his initial travel on some fool of a researcher who forgot to set a force-fold over the hole that he fell through in his dimension. "}
{"id": "32667_3", "pid": "32667_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between The Goon and the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20815, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Goon has many names and is also referred to as Ke-teeli and The Face. Ke-teeli is the boss of the three current members of the band, one member is out because he is injured. Ke-teeli owns an establishment that the band performs at. However, Ke-teeli repeatedly expresses his frustration and distaste over the band\u2019s music. Jimmie Stanley believes that Ke-teeli is really more unhappy with the lack of money that his establishment, The Space Room, is earning. \n\nWhen John Smith joins the band with his Zloomph instrument, The Goon seems to respond well. More cash is flowing into the business as the audience agrees with the music. However, The Goon will not let the bandmates sign a contract with him for their unemployment unless they can guarantee that John Smith and his Zloomph instrument will join them. \n"}
{"id": "32667_3", "pid": "32667_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between The Goon and the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20815, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Goon is the boss of the band. He is upset that the bass fiddle man is missing. Jimmie mentions that The Goon will be angry if he finds out that there\u2019s a cigarette hole burned in it. The band sometimes refers The Goon as Goon-Face and The Eye. This is the last week before the band\u2019s contract with The Goon ends. The band is worried that The Goon will not continue the contract since he has been showing little enthusiasm for their music. He always comment either too fast and loud or too slow and soft. He even states that it is better to have the customers disappointed than have them hear bad music. After he sees The Goon staring at them, Jimmie decides to start playing. Once The Goon hears the beautiful music played by John, he looks very surprised and is enjoying it. In the end, The Goon states that there will be a contract if the fiddle player comes as well. "}
{"id": "32667_3", "pid": "32667_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between The Goon and the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20815, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Goon-Face is the boss of the band. He is a business man and is looking only for profit, which doesn't satisfy him. The contract is ending soon and he doesn't see the reason in prolonging it. He is very irritable and considers the band's music bad. He liked John, but without him he doesn't need the band. He is cold and direct, his speech is concise. It's impossible to convince him or beg for something, he stays indifferent. "}
{"id": "32667_3", "pid": "32667_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between The Goon and the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20815, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Goon-Face runs The Space Room and is considered to be the boss of the band. They have a contract with him to play their music at the establishment. However, Goon-Face is initially very displeased by the fact that there are only three members present. He is also unwilling to renew the contract and constantly criticizes the band\u2019s music. Jimmie believes that the real reason is that there is not enough business in the establishment. Even when Jimmie says that the three of them will continue to play, if the fourth does not show up, Goon-Face is not impressed and says that having no music is better than bad music. He even tells them that if no bassist shows up, then they will go home. Once John Smith plays, he is pleased and beams like a kitten who has seen a quart of cream. Business begins to get better, but he is still cautious of the contract. He tells the band that he will only continue their contract if John Smith stays and signs it. After John disappears, he is furious again and refuses to discuss any contract because the bass fiddle man is gone. "}
{"id": "32667_4", "pid": "32667_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is it important to Jimmie for John to continue playing with the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jimmie\u2019s friend, Hammer-Head talks about the black puts of Neptune as a place that he and the rest of the band will likely go to if they do not secure a contract with The Goon. The black pits of Neptune is a place for musicians that are past their prime. \n\nThe Goon does not enjoy the band\u2019s music and threatens to not let them play at his establishment anymore. However, The Goon likes the music when John Smith plays with the band and especially the reception of the audience when John Smith is playing with the band. The Goon says that he will give the band a contract as long as John Smith agrees to join with his Zloomph. It is important to Jimmie for John to continue playing with the band so that they can get an employment contract from The Goon. \n"}
{"id": "32667_4", "pid": "32667_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is it important to Jimmie for John to continue playing with the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "It is important for Jimmie to continue playing with the band because the boss was not satisfied with their music before his arrival. Their contract ends this week, but it seems the boss is unlikely to continue it. After he plays his music on the bass fiddle, the boss is surprised by it. He enjoys the music. The audiences also like it. Noticing the change in the boss\u2019 attitude towards the music, Jimmie knows that he has to persuade John to join the band in order to get a contract. Later, the boss explicitly states that there will be a contract if the bass fiddle man stays, else there won\u2019t be any. Thus, Jimmie has to make John stay in the band. "}
{"id": "32667_4", "pid": "32667_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is it important to Jimmie for John to continue playing with the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The future of the whole band depends on John. The bass man hurt his fingers and he needs replacement. John is much better that the bass men, his music is extremely unique and even the most indifferent people in the room pay attention to it. Everyone adores him playing, without him the band was never really popular. Their concerts were not payed off well, their music didn't touch people, their boss was discontented. Their contract is ending and to prolong it they need John. Jimmie cares for the future of his band and the contract a lot as they can't do any other job and unsuccessful musicians can only go to the uranium pits of Neptune, where life is short. They don't even have money for fare. "}
{"id": "32667_4", "pid": "32667_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhy is it important to Jimmie for John to continue playing with the band?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20833, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "It is important to Jimmie for John to continue playing because the band will be allowed to continue playing in The Space Room and get their contracts renewed with Goon-Face. He considers John to be the best bass player in the galaxy and wants him to continue so the band can continue to earn a living. Jimmie even offers John a place to stay and doesn\u2019t mind babying him for the rest of his life if it means that the other man will continue to play the bass. His plans include breaking John\u2019s leg, finding an Earth blonde to capture his interest, or even forging a letter from the University to tell him that his theory is valid as a means of getting the man to stay. "}
{"id": "32667_5", "pid": "32667_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe John Smith and his instrument.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20799, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Smith is a human from Earth that is described as a very shot guy with a broad face and light blue eyes. He works with the Marsport union. When he enters the Space Room establishment, he is dressed in a tight black suit and is carrying his instrument, the Zloomph. John states that the Zloomph that he carries is an instrument that is over five thousand years old. He excitedly states that he found it in a pawn shop and that it\u2019s the only one in existence. \n\nThe Zloomph itself is described as being incredibly large, and very black. The tones that emitted from it were jazz-like and received well by the band, the audience, and The Goon. \n"}
{"id": "32667_5", "pid": "32667_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe John Smith and his instrument.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20799, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John\u2019s instrument is large, black, and old. It is taller and wider than a normal bass fiddle. It\u2019s shape is odd, looking like a black hour-glass. It has black, mirror-like wood. The music coming out of this instrument is beautiful. It is heavenly with depth, volume and richness. John calls it a Zloomph and mentions its uniqueness. John Smith is a little man, he is described as a matchstick. His face is flat and broad. He has sandcolored hair that is quite messy, long and dry. His blue eyes are watery. He wears a black color tightfitting suit. He is between twenty and forty. He speaks quickly. He does not like Venusian fizz and wine-syrup, but enjoys beer. He has a dreamy expression when playing music on his instrument. John is always noticing holes that seems common to everyone else. He does not care much about playing music, instead he likes to study ancient history and he needs to finish his plan, which is finding the correct hole. Because he needs to go back to his world to prove a theory. "}
{"id": "32667_5", "pid": "32667_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe John Smith and his instrument.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20799, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Smith is a bass fiddle, he is huge and looks like a monster, he looks disgusting. His instrument is over five thousand years, it's a Zloomph with a matchstick as old. The man has pale blue eyes and his age is indeterminable. He is silent almost all the time, but he loves beer, and it makes him talk. He mostly talks about the holes, as he is desperately seeking for the trans-dimensional one to get back to his time dimension. All the time he makes plans about it, also he is interested in history and proving theories about it. He is a great player, who makes everyone around listen with admiration and full attention, but music isn't his main passion. "}
{"id": "32667_5", "pid": "32667_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was \u2014whoops!...\n \n \n \n The Holes and John Smith\n \n\n By Edward W. Ludwig\n \n\n Illustration by Kelly Freas\n \n\n \n \n It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:\n\"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience.\"\n \n Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water\u2014and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.\n \n We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me\u2014Jimmie Stanley\u2014and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:\n\"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury.\"\n \n But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.\n \n Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.\n \n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.\n \n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute.\"\n \n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n \n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\" he squeaked.\n \n I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\" or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.\n \n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you.\" I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?\"\n \n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek.\"\n \n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here.\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think I hear him coming now.\"\n \n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.\n \n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n\"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And he whirled away.\n \n We waited.\n \n Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n \n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n \n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n\"Your brains?\"\n \n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too.\"\n \n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.\n \n Then it happened.\n \n \n \n From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.\n \n The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.\n \n His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.\n \n The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.\n \n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union.\" He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan.\"\n \n A moment's silence.\n \n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n \n \"How to get back home,\" he snapped as if I should have known it already.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.\n \n \"We'll talk about your plan at intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n\"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?\"\n \n \"I know everything ,\" said John Smith.\n \n I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.\n \n And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.\n \n Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then\u2014\n \n My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.\n \n The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.\n \n First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.\n \n But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.\n \n I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n \n I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n \n We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .\n \n We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.\n \n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n\"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n \n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.\n \n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence.\" He patted the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n \n I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.\n \n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to ask.\n \n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n\"For going home,\" he said.\n \n Hummm, I thought.\n \n \n \n We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle\u2014I mean, his Zloomph \u2014with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.\n \n But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n\"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an unusual hole in the front.\"\n \n Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. \"You\u2014you mean here? Where the music comes out?\"\n \n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n \n Hummm, I thought again.\n \n Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. \"What's the matter, John?\"\n \n He pointed.\n \n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages.\"\n \n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n\"even there....\"\n \n There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.\n \n It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.\n \n Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.\n \n At intermission I said, \"How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?\"\n \n He shook his head.\n \n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n \n His grunt was negative.\n \n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n \n He smiled. \"Yes, I like beer.\"\n \n I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.\n \n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, \"where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night.\"\n \n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan.\"\n \n \"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot.\"\n \n He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.\n\"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n \n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration struck me. \"And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,\n'copter landing\u2014if we ever get a\n'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages.\"\n \n His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.\n \n He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:\n \n \"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing.\"\n \n \"What do you like to do, John?\"\n \n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n\"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan.\"\n \n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n \n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting.\"\n \n He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. \"The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand.\"\n  Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.\n \n \n \"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there are so many holes in this universe.\"\n \n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n \n \"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows\u2014they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes\u2014millions and millions of holes!\"\n \n I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.\n \n His voice trembled with emotion.\n\"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is\u2014\"\n \n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as possible, \"what have these holes got to do with you?\"\n \n He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.\n\"What have they to do with me?\" he shrilled. \"I can't find the right one\u2014that's what!\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular hole are you looking for, John?\"\n \n He was speaking rapidly again now.\n \n \"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark\u2014and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole\u2014I fell through.\"\n \n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole\u2014is that why you have to find it?\"\n \n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\" he snapped, \" just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n \n His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. \"But there's still time for my plan to work out\u2014with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it.\"\n \n \"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one.\"\n \n He nodded. \"But it can't be too far away.\"\n \n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\" I said. \"But if you're not going to play with us\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he beamed. \"I can talk to you . You understand.\"\n \n Thank heaven!\n \n \n \n Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.\n \n John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.\n \n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n \n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n \n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay\u2014just as long as you want him.\"\n \n \"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\" I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n \n Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.\n \n A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n \n \"This is the first time he's talked to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n\"I\u2014I'm scared.\n \n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said, optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n \n We watched.\n \n John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n \n John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.\n \n John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.\n \n The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.\n \n John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.\n \n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n \n I rose swiftly. \"We better get over there. We should have known better\u2014\"\n \n We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.\n \n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said, weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole.\"\n \n I patted him on the back. \"No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll\u2014well, we'll help you.\"\n \n \"We're working on a plan, too,\" said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n\"We're going to make a more scientific approach.\"\n \n \"How?\" John asked.\n \n Fat Boy gulped.\n \n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n\"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work.\"\n \n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll stay\u2014until tomorrow.\"\n \n \n \n All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?\n \n \n Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.\n \n It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.\n \n John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.\n \n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n \n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n\"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!\"\n \n \"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory.\"\n \n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n \n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n \n \"It's my body. It's\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?\"\n \n His face was white with terror.\n\"No, my\u2014 my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?\"\n \n He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.\n \n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n\"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n \n We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.\n \n I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph \u2014steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.\n \n Then\u2014he was gone.\n \n John just slipped out of my grasp\u2014 Zloomph and all\u2014and was gone\u2014completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing\u2014nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.\n \n \"\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\u2014is it.\"\n \n John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....\n \n \n \n Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n \n Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.\n \n We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.\n \n Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.\n \n And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.\n \n \n\n  ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe John Smith and his instrument.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 20748, "query_start_index": 20750, "query_end_index": 20799, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "John Smith is physically described as a little guy similar to an animated matchstick. He has a flat, broad face that seems to have been compressed in a vice. His mop of hair is sand-colored, and Jimmie is reminded of a field of dry grass with strands that form loops to the side of his face. He also has pale, watery blue eyes and wears a tight-fitting black suit. Jimmie says it is impossible to guess his age as he could be anywhere between twenty and forty. When John speaks, it is shrill and rapid. However, when he talks about the holes and his ancient history theories, he becomes much more enthusiastic and lights up. Other than those times, he is quite silent and has sad eyes. The others find him eccentric, but they want to keep him around because of his bass-playing abilities. His instrument is called a Zloomph. It is an enormous black monstrosity, and Jimmie thinks it came from a pawnbroker\u2019s attic. It is a queerly-shaped bass fiddle. It is also too tall and too wide. John says the Zloomph is over five thousand years old and is the only one in existence. It can play any song, and the sound that comes out of it is the whole chord instead of just a single note. When Jimmie listens to it, he feels his blood tingling with each plucked note. "}
{"id": "32744_1", "pid": "32744_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32710, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary were sent to look for another planet for humans to live on. After looking for two thousand years, their \"Milky Way\" expedition had failed to find an alternative, but humans were desperate because Earth was scorched and not easily liveable. The President is taken aback by the news, and his council looked at some footage from the expedition, watching ships explode and seeing dangerous atmospheres that would not sustain human life. A thousand people were grown from cultured scar tissue only to die violent deaths, so people yelled for the video to be shut off. President Davis explains that violent death is an unfamiliar thing to the contemporary humans, so he decided to lie to the public about the expedition details. Michael had promised Mary they would stay on Earth, but the government lying to the public was hard--Mary suggests that Michael can still leave, but he doesn't want to go without her, and she wants to stay on the planet she came from, even if it means a difficult life on Earth. They remember their lockets, that give them the option of a quick death in case they had gotten trapped in a dangerous situation, but they don't want to threaten to kill themselves either. Mary admits she's pregnant, which is surprising because humans in this day are cultured from scar tissue. With heavy hearts, they looked out onto the city where the large TV screens were promising the public an idyllic planet that would one day be recovered again, through a different mission, which is disheartening because their own mission had turned into a lie. They went back into the council chambers and sat again. Michael and Mary were told they'd be kept in solitary confinement to protect the public, which was ironic since Mary wanted to stay on Earth to avoid loneliness. Michael reminds the President of the lockets he and his wife have, and there is panic--what is there to do? The President demanded they hand over the lockets, but Michael and Mary stay strong and ask to be let outside of the city's protective barrier so that they can experience a natural death. The President conceded, so that he didn't have to look at them anymore, and gave them the car that they asked for. They have supplies to last a year, but don't know where to go or what to do. They get out of their car and take their shoes off to walk around, experiencing quiet for the first time in memory. To their surprise, they found three blades of grass, and run to a hill to see other patches of green in the area, some animals, and a small spring. They have hope: they can build a house, have a child, and eventually they can show the ones in the city that there is hope much closer than they realized. "}
{"id": "32744_1", "pid": "32744_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32710, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary arrive back on Earth after a 2,000-year expedition scouting the galaxy for any potential new planets for humans to move to. After finding nothing, Michael is hesitant to report the news back to Earth and wants to stay in space. Mary, however, insists they return to Earth, so they step out of their spaceship and give the first press conference detailing their failed exploit. Michael does not hold back on the details and shocks the hopeful humans to their core. The President pulls them aside and interrogates them with his council. They share all the pictures from their adventures into the galaxy, showing yellow aliens, planets with deadly atmospheres, and horrific images of the other couples on the expedition dying. The council becomes ill at the images of their gruesome deaths, so the President shuts down the slideshow. Apparently, humans were no longer accustomed to violent deaths, as they hadn\u2019t had to see any for thousands of years. The last time such an occurrence happened, a man was struck and killed by a ground car, and all the witnesses were driven mad. The President had shut down any potential violent deaths from then on. \nThe President asks for hope from Michael and Mary, but they are unable to give him any. They send them out of the chambers to deliberate their fate. Michael and Mary discuss their options. Mary wants to stay and die on Earth, while Michael wants to escape. They decide to use their lockets which cause instant death for the wearers to force the council\u2019s hand. Mary reveals that she is pregnant, something that hasn\u2019t occurred for three thousand years due to overpopulation laws, and Michael agrees to stay on Earth. \nThey return to the chambers, and the President delivers their verdict. They are condemned to isolation until the next expedition is set out, because he fears they will reveal the truth to Earth. He sent out a broadcast earlier saying there was hope after all, as they had found a planet, but lost it, so another expedition would be sent out soon. Michael and Mary refuse their isolation, and threaten to kill themselves with the lockets unless they are released and given a ground car and supplies. The President agrees after he and his congregation are thrown by the thought of watching someone die in front of their eyes. \nThe story flashes forward to Mary and Michael driving out of the city and into the sandy mountains. They come to a valley and step out of the car, placing their bare feet on the soil. Mary sees three blades of grass and shows Michael excitedly. They run down the hill and discover baby trees, flowers, wildlife, and a small stream. The Earth is healing itself, and they had the proof. Thrilled that htey will be able to live off the land, they start planning where they will put their cabin and when they will reintroduce this new Earth to humanity. \n"}
{"id": "32744_1", "pid": "32744_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32710, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary are returning from a mission to discover other planets in the Milky Way suitable for human colonization. During their exploration, which spanned two thousand years, the one thousand other humans sent with them had all died. They are the lone survivors, returning to Earth with grave news that there is no other place in the galaxy humans can move to. The remaining humans on Earth are overjoyed when they make radio contact because their life on Earth is confined to a city huddled around a water hole in a desert where their technology for distilling the salty water is the only thing keeping them alive on a planet they condemn as devoid of any other resources.\n \nMichael is hesitant to land on Earth, but Mary is determined to spend the rest of her life there now. They land and deliver a speech to a cheering crowd of white faces that are the same as those that had cheered when their mission departed two thousand years ago. Humans have technology to tissue culture new bodies and effectively become immortal. Pregnancy was outlawed 3000 years ago to control the population, and ever since then they have been regenerating their bodies. Michael announces that there are no other habitable planets. President Davis begs Michael to retract what he has said, and tells the public that there has been a mistake, that everything will be \u201call right\u201d, and that they should go back to work and wait for more information. \nMichael and Mary are brought to the council to deliver a 60 second video documenting their entire two thousand year mission. Most disturbing is that it shows the violent deaths of many explorers - some being sucked into the gravity of foreign planets, or their ships exploding after colliding with meteors. Violent death was last witnessed on Earth hundreds of years ago, and all of the witnesses went insane. The video is shocking and disturbing. The President quickly denies the validity of the video evidence, desperately trying to avoid any hysteria by the public. Michael and Mary are told to wait outside the council chambers while their fate is decided. \nMichael thinks they should have never landed on the planet, but Mary reveals she is pregnant and wants to remain on Earth. They plan to leave the city by threatening to kill themselves in front of the council. Out the window, they glimpse a public screen projection showing that there is going to be a new mission to space and everything will be \u201call right\u201d. The council decides Michael and Mary will be placed in solitary confinement. The couple threaten to kill themselves using their lockets in front of the council, a violent death that would make those who see it go insane. They demand a ground car with a year of supplies, which they are granted. They leave the city together and soon discover an oasis with spring water to build a house next to and raise their child."}
{"id": "32744_1", "pid": "32744_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32710, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary return to Earth from a 2,000-year-long mission to find a planet suitable for human habitation because Earth's resources have slowly dwindled away due to human greed and atomic war. Michael would rather end his life than tell those remaining on Earth that their mission had failed, but Mary believes they owe it to the one thousand who had perished on the expedition to reveal the truth to them. Besides, 2,000 years away from Earth is a long time, and she misses home. A crowd eagerly welcomes them, including President Davis, and Michael soon confesses no planets exist that can support human life. He and Mary have returned to Earth to stay and die. President Davis whisks them away from the troubled crowd and brings them to the council chambers, where Michael and Mary reveal the documentary footage of their trip. They show the council hundreds of years' worth of visual evidence of all the planets they visited, all the strange creatures they encountered, and, worst of all, the explicit, violent deaths of their fellow travelers. Upon seeing these deaths, the council members insist Michael and Mary turn off the footage. They are horrified by the violent images because it has been hundreds of years since any human has died a violent death; seeing such images would drive them insane. As the President and council members discuss the couple's fate, Michael and Mary await their decision and discuss what to do next. Michael wants to go back to space, while Mary wants to stay on Earth because she has grown weary of traveling and exhausted by the process of reincarnation that has kept them both alive for 2,000 years. Mary reminds Michael of the lockets they carry--lockets that were given to them prior to departing for their journey that have the power to kill them instantly in order to avoid a painful death. Mary suggests using this locket as leverage against the council, who would grant whatever they asked in exchange for not having to witness their gruesome suicides in person. She also reveals she is pregnant. Later, President Davis announces the council has altered their documentary footage in order to spare the hope of their people, and he tells Michael and Mary that they will spend the rest of their lives in solitary confinement with everything provided for them, including the tools of reincarnation. At that moment, Michael threatens to trigger his locket unless the council gives him and Mary a ground car and provisions and lets them leave the force walls surrounding the last-remaining Earth settlement. President Davis grants their wish. Together, Michael and Mary head out into the desolation of Earth. Soon they discover evidence of new life on Earth including grass, birds, and water. They set out to build their home and prepare to restore civilization."}
{"id": "32744_2", "pid": "32744_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Michael and Mary's relationship and their conflicting preferences\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32754, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary are two humans who were sent on an expedition to find a habitable planet elsewhere in the solar system after humans destroyed their own planet during the Atomic Wars, and continued to drive it into the ground through their own greed for resources. Three thousand years after the Wars, the expedition was sent out (so five thousand years have passed in total since the Wars). Michael and Mary are the only two people who survived, and their return was two thousand years after they left Earth. They are married, though contemporary relationships do not involve much physical touching as compared to the twenty-first century, in a few ways. When Michael hugs Mary to comfort her, he mentions that it is a custom of the past. In their society, it is illegal to have children through sexual intercourse, so it is a surprise at the end of the story when Mary admits that she might be pregnant. They have endured a lot together on their mission in outer space, and have had to watch a lot of people die. It was very isolating to be in space, living on a ship, and this is part of their other major discussion: what to do when their mission was over. Michael had some desire to stay in space and not return to the scorched planet. However, Mary wanted to return to Earth, and the two of them wanted to stay together no matter what. This turned out to work in their favor: staying on Earth but wanting to stay alive is what gave them the opportunity to find the patches of life they found at the end of the story. "}
{"id": "32744_2", "pid": "32744_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Michael and Mary's relationship and their conflicting preferences\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32754, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The first initial conflict of the story is the debate between Michael and Mary as to whether or not to return to the stars or stay on Earth. Mary wants to place her feet on solid ground again and die with the earth as humans were meant to do, but Michael wants to return to space and escape the burden of sharing their catastrophic news with their fellow man.  Mary wins the debate, claiming that she hasn\u2019t asked much of Michael over their 2,000-year relationship. \nAs the story continues, the reader sees how they deal with their trauma differently. Michael still wants to return to space and asks Mary if they can after presenting their findings to the President\u2019s council. She says he can go without her, but he doesn\u2019t think he could be away from her. Mary wants to die on the earth, while Michael wants to escape to space once again. When Michael hears that Mary is pregnant, he hops on board with her idea to stay on Earth. \nMichael and Mary are clearly a team. They have worked and existed together for 2,000 years without change and have watched all their friends and colleagues die. This trauma clearly bonded them, as Michael says he could never return to space without Mary. Although they may differ, they reach compromises and work together to find the best solution for the two of them. \n"}
{"id": "32744_2", "pid": "32744_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Michael and Mary's relationship and their conflicting preferences\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32754, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary are two humans from Earth who have effectively become immortal through a scar tissue culturing technology that allows them to continually regenerate entirely new bodies for themselves as their bodies grow old and die. They have been regenerating their bodies like this, and living on a spaceship together exploring the Milky Way for 2000 years. They love each other deeply.\nWhen they finally return to Earth to deliver the horrible news that there is no other planet in the galaxy that humans can live on, Mary declares to him that she must stay on Earth. She insists that she has loved him for so long (thousands of years) and has asked for very little except for them to now remain on Earth. \nMichael feels as though they should not have ever landed on Earth, but instead wishes they just delivered their message by radio and returned back into space. He can\u2019t understand why she wants to live on Earth when it is so desolate. However, he says that he can not be without her and will kill himself if he were to go back into space alone. When Mary reveals in private to Michael that she is pregnant, they know they will not be accepted by society and hatch a plan to leave the city together. A human has not given birth to a child for 3000 years on Earth. Pregnancy was forbidden to reduce the population until it was low enough that there were sufficient resources available to sustain those that remained.\nThey successfully escape their city and the fate of solitary confinement from the council by threatening to kill themselves with their lockets, which would be a violent death that would cause the onlookers to go insane. This is so shocking and unacceptable to the council that the President grants them a ground car and a year of supplies to leave the city and never return. Michael and Mary find an oasis with vegetation and fresh spring water not far on their journey outside the city. It is a place for them to build a house and raise their child, which is joyful for both of them.\n"}
{"id": "32744_2", "pid": "32744_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Michael and Mary's relationship and their conflicting preferences\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32754, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary are a couple deeply in love. They join a crew of one thousand other humans, also comprised of couples, who leave Earth in order to find another habitable planet. As their fellow travelers slowly die over the course of 2,000 years, Michael and Mary continue to reincarnate through a special process of culturing their scar tissue. They also carry lockets that can kill them instantly when triggered and help them avoid a painful death. When they realize their mission has failed, Michael and Mary return to Earth to announce the news. Michael wishes to go back to space since he cannot stand the desolation of Earth and would rather spend the rest of his existence with Mary exploring the universe. Mary wants to stay on Earth because she misses her home and because she is pregnant, although she does not reveal this to Michael until just before President Davis reveals his decision to place the couple in solitary confinement. Michael is shocked because pregnancy had been banned on Earth at the time that atomic war and human greed had laid bare the planet's essential resources. Together, they decide to use their lockets as leverage against the council to force them to permit them to leave the city. Soon after doing so, they discover Earth is regenerating, and they will be able to make a new home for their child."}
{"id": "32744_3", "pid": "32744_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the mission that Michael and Mary were sent on\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32735, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary were on a mission to find a habitable planet after the Atomic Wars decimated Earth, making it barely habitable. It was a long journey, and the two have been gone from Earth for a long time--they had undergone reincarnation for two thousand years. However, nobody else on the expedition made it--all of the children who were created through the culturing of scar tissue died in various ways, including ships suffering violent explosions and being struck by rocks in space. This meant that a thousand other people died, and Mary wanted to keep living for the sake of these people that perished on the mission. They returned to Earth on their ship called the Milky Way with the bad news that none of the planets they encountered would have been able to sustain human life, and even if they had found one, the journey there would have been so dangerous that a vast majority of the people who attempted to travel there would never have made it alive."}
{"id": "32744_3", "pid": "32744_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the mission that Michael and Mary were sent on\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32735, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Two thousand years before The Valley by Richard Stockham begins, Michael, Mary, and a thousand other couples were sent out into space to locate a new home for the humans. The Atomic Wars and several thousand years of greed, gluttony, and selfishness destroyed the Earth, leaving behind only a barren wasteland. Presumably, the President created new laws to protect humans as is, curbing population growth and finding new ways to grow food and exist on this barren planet. All humans are crowded in one city and exist through reincarnation, so no babies can be born. \nSince the Earth was truly no longer able to support any sort of life (be it flora or fauna), a grand expedition was sent out to see if a mass exodus could occur. However, after two thousand years of searching, Michael and Mary conclude that humans were given one planet and one planet only. \n"}
{"id": "32744_3", "pid": "32744_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the mission that Michael and Mary were sent on\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32735, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary were sent on an exploratory space mission from Earth with one thousand other humans to discover other planets in the Milky Way that were suitable for human colonization. The purpose of the mission was to move humanity to a new planet after the destruction of Earth from atomic wars and greed. During their two thousand year exploration, the thousand others sent with them had all died. They had seen many life forms on different planets and a variety of alien creatures. The thousand others with them had died violent deaths in the dangers of space, sometimes hurtling into alien planets or exploding by meteor collisions.\nWhat they discovered is that Earth is the only planet habitable for humans and there is no other place in the galaxy that they can go. This is shocking news to the rest of the people of Earth, who have been waiting for those two thousand years to have news of hope that there is somewhere else they can move. The resources on Earth have been exploited to an extreme, where the only humans remaining are living in a tightly clustered city around a salty body of water they must pump and distill to sustain themselves, surrounded by dusty desert.\n"}
{"id": "32744_3", "pid": "32744_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the mission that Michael and Mary were sent on\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32735, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Due to the ravages of atomic war and the insatiable greed of humankind, Earth has been left in a desolate state. The last remaining humans live in a city next to a shrinking sea, from which they gather water through loud, throbbing pumps. Mary describes the situation as a family living in a home that they do not take of; instead, they move from room to room as the house slowly falls to pieces around them. Michael and Mary join a cohort of one thousand other humans who make their way into space in order to discover a new planet suitable for human habitation. Over the course of their 2,000-year journey, they come upon a number of planets, none of which can support human life: Some of the planets have toxic atmospheres, others dangerous winds and animals. Along the way, the rest of their cohort is violently decimated while Michael and Mary remain alive thanks to the process of reincarnation. "}
{"id": "32744_4", "pid": "32744_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the President's communciations to the public and the reasoning behind his choices\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the earth of the future that is at the center of this story, the society has managed to reduce accidents so much that violent deaths do not happen. This happened because some people reacted with hysterics to witnessing death of this type, so efforts were made to avoid the issue entirely, which had been successful for the past few hundred years. President Davis did not want the public to hear any more details about the expedition after Michael and Mary first addressed everyone. He says that the only reason the public has not lost all sense after seeing some of the footage from the expedition is that it was visual media and stories, but not something people witnessed first-hand for themselves. However, he does not want to expose the people to the violent deaths that the people on the expedition suffered, so he claims that Michael and Mary did not tell the truth, in an effort to save face. The President considers this type of lying to be for the good of the people, who cannot handle the reality of the expedition. He also does not think that the people could handle the loss of hope for another planet to live on, which is why he plays the ad campaigns for a new expediton in a different solar system that aims to eventually find (or rediscover, in his words) another planet for humans to inhabit, perhaps in Andromeda. In this way, the President thinks it is better for his people to have false hope instead of no hope at all. The reader sees the irony in this at the end of the story when Michael and Mary find the patch of life that has started to re-establish itself outside of the boundaries of the city they ventured from. "}
{"id": "32744_4", "pid": "32744_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the President's communciations to the public and the reasoning behind his choices\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary return to Earth after 2,000 years only to report the worst news possible: there is no other virgin planet in this galaxy that has the ability to shelter humans. They announce their news to the public, but the President quickly shuts down the conference and brings them inside so they can report their more detailed findings. After showing them the pictures of the various planets, aliens, and demises of their colleagues, they concur once again that Earth is their only home. However, the President lies to the public, releasing a broadcast stating that they found and lost a planet, and another expedition will be sent out shortly to relocate their new home. He claims that his people need hope to keep going, which may be true. After living for thousands of years through reincarnation on barren Earth, his people are desperate for hope and a new planet. Without hope, their entire society would fall apart, as their eventual deaths would become a very real future. "}
{"id": "32744_4", "pid": "32744_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the President's communciations to the public and the reasoning behind his choices\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When Michael and Mary land on Earth and report that there are no other habitable planets for humans to move to in the Milky Way galaxy after two thousand years of space exploration, President Davis quickly moves to silence their truth. The President begs Michael to take back what he has said to the people, and when he refuses, the President quickly pivots the message to the public. He declares that there has been a mistake, and tells them that everything will be \u201call right\u201d and that they should all go back to the pumps and distilleries to work and wait for more information.\nMichael and Mary present deeply disturbing video evidence to the President and council detailing the gruesome deaths of their thousand other peers sent on the mission because of the dangers of space travel. Some died by explosions in meteor fields or getting sucked into the gravity of dangerous planetary bodies. The President knows that the people of Earth have not witnessed the image of a violent death in hundreds of years, and that the last time it was seen all the witnesses went insane. The President quickly denies the video evidence in front of the council, saying that what they showed was only a picture, and if it were screened for the rest of the people on Earth there would be mass hysteria.\nThe President is desperately trying to avoid any hysteria by the public, and fears that if they knew the real truth from Michael and Mary that their society would cease to function entirely. The council ultimately decides that Michael and Mary will never be allowed to mingle with the public on Earth because their truth is too dangerous for people to know. They will be taken care of, and allowed to continue their lives as they have been in solitary confinement. The President informs the public that the statement Michael made was untrue, and quickly begins a new ad campaign of hope in the city by announcing a new mission to explore a different galaxy for habitable planets.\n"}
{"id": "32744_4", "pid": "32744_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the President's communciations to the public and the reasoning behind his choices\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32770, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When Michael and Mary return from space, President Davis is overwhelmed but hopeful that they have discovered a planet suitable for human life. When Michael unceremoniously reveals that the mission was a failure, President Davis immediately ushers them off stage and takes them before a small council, where they show them the visual footage with evidence proving their mission to be a failure along with the violent deaths of the rest of their thousand-person cohort. President Davis explains that the remaining humans have not seen a violent human death in hundreds of years and seeing such footage would surely drive them insane. The council members themselves lash out and insist the footage be turned off when they see it. After convening privately with the council, President Davis informs Michael and Mary that they have scrubbed the violent footage and replaced it with images intended to give the people hope that there is a habitable planet. He also informs them that they will be placed in solitary confinement with all necessities and comforts provided to them as thanks for their service to humankind. He reasons that keeping them away from the rest of the people will help preserve the image of hope he wants to foster amongst the people."}
{"id": "32744_5", "pid": "32744_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of the lockets in the story and how do they connect to the various societies\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32773, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michael and Mary, who have both just returned from a long expedition in a spacecraft, each keep a small golden locket around their neck. They were given these when they left on their mission, as a sort of escape hatch: if they were ever caught in a dangerous situation where they would have to die painful deaths, they could scratch themselves with the locket and they would die a quick and painless death instead of suffering. This is the first hint we see at the society's growing avoidance of painful deaths. For the people on the expedition, they were a tool to be used in case of emergency for the sake of the person wearing them. In the context of the society on Earth, however, they were a tool to negotiate the terms of how Michael and Mary would live. They considered threatening using these lockets to kill themselves, which they eventually did in a discussion with the President and his council. After they used the lockets, although they would die painless deaths, it would look very painful to the witnesses as the bodies experienced shock, so President Davis didn't want his people to see this. "}
{"id": "32744_5", "pid": "32744_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of the lockets in the story and how do they connect to the various societies\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32773, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The lockets were given to all of the many members of the expedition into space to find a new, untainted home planet. These necklaces were outfitted with a device that would kill the wearer, presumably when held up to their throats as is demonstrated in the story, painlessly and quickly. In the 2,000 years since Michael, Mary, and the rest of the expedition left Earth, humans grew unaccustomed to violence. In fact, the sight of a man being killed by a ground car on accident sent all witnesses into a state of utter insanity. This incapacity for violence turns out to be of great use to Michael and Mary, who saw the rest of their team die horrible, bloody deaths over the course of their two-thousand-year-long journey. \nAfter the President condemns Michael and Mary to isolation due to their findings and unwillingness to return to space or lie to the public, the two threaten to kill themselves in front of his whole congregation, which would send the room into shock and panic. People begin to freak out, whispering about how crazy they are, but the President and his colleagues see the real danger in this. They don\u2019t believe Mary and Michael will actually do it, so they step closer to them, which only causes them to bring the lockets closer to their necks. The President and his people\u2019s unfamiliarity with violence saves Michael and Mary from isolation, as the President grants all their wishes in return for their lives. \n"}
{"id": "32744_5", "pid": "32744_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of the lockets in the story and how do they connect to the various societies\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32773, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The lockets were given to the original cohort of space explorers, including Michael and Mary, that went out on a two thousand year mission to find other planets suitable for human colonization in the Milky Way galaxy. The function of the locket is to provide a quick and painless death to the wearer should they be in a situation where they are going to have a painful death. The wearer simply presses the locket and scratches themselves with it to kill themselves. Although painless to them, their bodies appear to writhe and convulse until they go lifeless. \nMichael and Mary use the threat of killing themselves with their lockets in front of the President and the council to demand they be allowed to leave the city in a ground car with supplies instead of being put into solitary confinement for the foreseen future. They cause an uproar in the council chambers when they hold the lockets to their necks, with onlookers shocked and frightened by the thought of their own horrible fate if they witness their death. This is effective, because the death from the locket appears violent to those watching and they fear going insane if they see it.\nLockets are a method for the explorers to kill themselves, which is an interesting juxtaposition to the society remaining on Earth. Their main objective is perpetuating themselves through scar tissue regeneration technology that essentially provides them with immortality, and strict avoidance of death. \n"}
{"id": "32744_5", "pid": "32744_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTranscriber's Note:\n \n \n This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n \n \n \n \n THE VALLEY\n \n\n By Richard Stockham\n \n\n Illustrated by Ed Emsh\n \n \n  If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence\u2014where the grass is always greener.\n \n\n \n The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.\n \n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.\n \n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!\"\n \n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President\u2014Davis is\u2014overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people\u2014with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n \n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n \n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n \n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n \n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n \n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder.\"\n \n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n \n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They sent us out. They've waited so long\u2014.\"\n \n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n \n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over.\"\n \n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n \n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n \n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael.\"\n \n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\n \n \n \n The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.\n \n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n \n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n \n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n \n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.\n \n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n \n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.\n \n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay\u2014and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n \n The silence did not change.\n \n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n \n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.\n \n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.\n \n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!\"\n \n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n\"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be.\"\n \n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n \n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !\"\n \n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.\n \n \n \n They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.\n \n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you heard, they report\u2014complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now, the proof.\"\n \n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n \n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n \n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n \n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n \n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.\n \n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.\n \n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.\n \n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.\n \n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space\u2014all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.\n \n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n \n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.\n \n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n \n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.\n \n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n \n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\n \n \n \n Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.\n \n \"There\u2014there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years.\"\n \n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n \n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n \n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space.\"\n \n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n \n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.\n \n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you can't bring it back to life.\"\n \n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n \n \"None.\"\n \n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n \n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President.\"\n \n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n \n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people.\"\n \n Michael and Mary were silent.\n \n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n\"until we have reached our decision.\"\n \n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.\n \n \n \n In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n \n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.\n \n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone back into space.\"\n \n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n \n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you.\"\n \n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n \n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n \n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n \n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and looked away from her. \"We're crazy\u2014talking as though we had a choice.\"\n \n \"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice.\"\n \n \"What're you talking about?\"\n \n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n \n He waited.\n \n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n \n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n \n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n \n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?\"\n \n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n \n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I\u2014I don't know how to say this.\"\n \n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n \n \"I'm\u2014going to have a child.\"\n \n His face went blank.\n \n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n \n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n \n \"It's true.\"\n \n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n \n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n \n He shook his head. \"I don't know\u2014what to\u2014to say. It's so incredible.\"\n \n \"Maybe\u2014I got so\u2014tired\u2014just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just\u2014something I felt I had to do. Some\u2014 real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth\u2014so\u2014so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think\u2014it would be like this.\"\n \n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done.\"\n \n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n \n \"And so this will be just for us .\" He took her in his arms. \"If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth\u2014if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do\u2014Well, we'll see.\"\n \n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.\n \n \n \n They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:\n \n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right.\"\n \n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie.\"\n \n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n \n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n \n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n \n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n \n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n \n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.\n \n \n \n Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n \n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n \n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n \n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n\"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society.\"\n \n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n \n \"Yes, there is.\"\n \n \"Proceed.\"\n \n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n \n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure.\"\n \n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.\n \n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n \n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n \n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died\u2014yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n \n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.\n \n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.\n \n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n \n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.\n \n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n \n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n \n \"If you want to see us die\u2014just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you.\"\n \n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.\n \n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to\u2014to give me those\u2014lockets! It's your\u2014duty!\"\n \n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To ourselves.\"\n \n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n \n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n \n The President's body sagged. \"What\u2014what is it you want?\"\n \n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death.\"\n \n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n \n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.\n \n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth\u2014to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again.\"\n \n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n \n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And\u2014supplies.... Yes.\"\n \n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains.\"\n \n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n \n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.\n \n \n \n It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n \n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.\n \n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you think they'd be with us?\"\n \n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space again\u2014or in prison.\"\n \n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.\n \n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n \n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself.\"\n \n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the land?\"\n \n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n \n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.\n \n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n \n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?\"\n \n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.\n \n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n \n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n\"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n \n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me back.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n \n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n \n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n \n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n \n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n \n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n \n \"Mary!\"\n \n She stopped, whirling around.\n \n He was staring down at her feet.\n \n She followed his gaze.\n \n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n \n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n \n \"They're new,\" he said.\n \n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.\n \n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n \n \"Oh!\"\n \n Her hand found his.\n \n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.\n \n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n \n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n \n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n \n \"We can live here, Michael!\"\n \n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child.\"\n \n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n \n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them.\"\n \n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.\n \n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.\n \n \n ... THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the role of the lockets in the story and how do they connect to the various societies\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32668, "query_start_index": 32670, "query_end_index": 32773, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Prior to leaving for the mission to find a habitable planet for humans to relocate to, Michael and Mary are both given lockets that can be triggered to cause immediate death. The purpose is to avoid a potentially violent and painful death from whatever threat might be encountered out in unknown space. When they return to Earth 2,000 years later, Michael wants to press the locket rather than return to inform the people of their failure. Mary insists they return, however, presumably because she misses home (in reality, it is because she is pregnant). After President Davis and the council meet privately to determine the couple's fate, Mary reminds Michael that they have a bargaining chip available to them that will allow them to determine their own fate: the lockets. Because humans have not seen violent death in hundreds of years, Mary knows that the council will yield to whatever they demand in exchange for not having to witness their suicides in person. In this way, Michael and Mary negotiate their release from the city and are effectively banished outside the force walls."}
{"id": "49838_1", "pid": "49838_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes place in the year 2102 and centers around a family with powers, including telekenisis and teleportation. The narrator is Kevin, one of the sons: he is the only person in the family without powers, a \"psi-deficient\", so he stays at home to take care of the house. The story starts at the breakfast table, where the father teleports in, the mother probes the others' thoughts, and there is grumbling about the goings-on in the household. Timothy, the youngest brother, senses turmoil in the family but is also the most hopeful--he figures that Kevin has a gift they just haven't discovered yet, which is encouraging to Kevin. After everyone else in the family leaves for their jobs, Kevin is left to think about his situation, so he goes for a long walk. Reading is his only other real source of entertainment; he doesn't have many friends because nobody wanted to play sports with someone without telepathic abilities. He couldn't explore space because other planets weren't habitable, so he wondered what would make him stand out. The reader learns that the psi powers were latent in humans and developed with exposure to nuclear energy. When he gets home from his walk, Kevin's entire family is there, processing some news. There are two inhabited planets in Alpha Centauri, and the aliens there might be preparing for war.  Kevin partly hoped there would be war for a change of pace, and his mom figured people should start learning first-aid, including Kevin. He had a benefit over his sister because he couldn't sense others' pain in the same way. He met a girl named Lucy in his first-aid class who he liked, and she was a \"low-grade telesensitive\" so he didn't have to worry about his thoughts being read. Once the aliens attacked, things got hard as Kevin had to face the injured people bought to his care. This was especially shocking because injury was not common in his world. This was where Kevin finally found his power: touching the injured people healed them almost instantly. It turned out he was the only human with this power, which was invaluable -- a hospital was even built just for Kevin to work in, where Lucy became his assistant. All at once, he became the most important human on the planet, but the humans had to hide this from their alien adversaries. Lucy was jealous of Kevin but also worried about what would happen to Kevin when the war ended, which it eventually did four months later. The story ends with Kevin returning home after the Vice President informed him that his services were no longer needed. "}
{"id": "49838_1", "pid": "49838_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin Faraday is psi-deficient in a family of five with special psi powers living in a world largely free of disease and conflict. His father is telepathic and uses this ability to help him get to long-distance appointments as a traveling salesman. His middle brother, Danny, has the power of telekinesis and works as a junior partner in a moving company. Kevin's sister, Sylvia, can sense emotions in people, so she is able to tell when he purposefully intensifies his anger to make her feel uncomfortable. The youngest of the family is Timothy, who works as a weather forecaster thanks to his powerful gift of prognostication. Kevin's mother is a psychiatrist with telepathic powers that she uses to read his mind. In fact, most people in the world have some kind of telepathic powers--they can read the minds of others unprotected by mind shields. While the rest of the family treats him awkwardly and goes off to their respective jobs every day, Kevin stays at home to maintain the house. However, even this task makes him feel largely useless because most of the chores can be completed by household machines. Therefore, Kevin spends much of his time daydreaming about what life would have been like for him had he been living in 1960 instead of 2102. He feels a stronger empathy for dying plants than he does for other humans, and this has given him the reputation of callousness. Although Kevin is largely resigned to his fate as a psi-deficient in a world of people with special powers, his brother Tim insists that he has some ability; it simply hasn't been discovered yet. The rest of the family shrugs off this notion, but Kevin secretly latches onto this hope. Because of his inability to tap into the telepathically-broadcast news transmissions, Kevin's family one day alerts him that a starship has returned to Earth from Alpha Centauri, where its crew had discovered two Earth-type planets. This excites Kevin, but unfortunately, the inhabitants of these planets are hostile, and they eventually make their way to Earth to begin a war. In preparation for the war, Kevin's mother encourages him and Sylvia to learn first-aid techniques at the Psycho Center in order to be ready to help the injured. During his training, Kevin meets a girl named Lucy, who flirts with him and admires his strength. When Kevin gets his first patient, he is shocked to discover that he is able to heal the injured man with a simple touch of his hands. Having discovered his new ability, Kevin sets out to heal as many of the wounded as possible; later, he learns that he is the only psi-negative in the world with this ability. Eventually, he is given his own hospital and hailed as a hero by various dignitaries including the President. When the war ends and the aliens surrender, however, Earth is no longer in need of his services, and he is out of a job again.\n"}
{"id": "49838_1", "pid": "49838_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the year 2102, the Faraday family are setting the table and gathering for a meal together in their home. Humans have supernatural powers (psi-powers) that began to show after nuclear energy was developed in the 1960s, and most of the family have special abilities. Father can teleport, Mother (Amy) is a telepathic psychiatrist, Dan (Danny) can move objects via telekinesis, Sylvia is telesensitive, and Tim can predict the future. Kevin (Kev) has no apparent powers, and feels disconnected and isolated from most of his family because without powers he is of little use to society. The exception is his brother Tim, who suggests that there just isn\u2019t a test yet for the powers that Kev has. His father asks if they should send him to a psychiatrist again, and his mother expresses disappointment at the amount of tests that have been run on Kev with no sign of psi-powers. \nKev is crestfallen that he doesn\u2019t really have any life other than going on long walks and watching the house. He is sad he never had the chance to try exploring space, but by the time he was ten years old humans had already concluded that all the other planets were unsuited to human life. \nThere are television-like telepathic projections in the society called \u201ctellies\u201d that those with psi-powers receive. One day, a tellie reports that space explorers from Earth have found two inhabited Earth-type planets in Alpha Centauri. The aliens chased off the humans in their own spaceships and now it is possible that aliens could attack Earth in less than six months. Kev\u2019s mother decides there will be a lot more people in need of medical training to treat casualties if there is an attack, and recruits Sylvia and Kev to train at the Psycho Center. During training, Kev meets a girl named Lucie who is a poet and they develop a fond relationship with each other. When alien weapons begin striking near their town, the casualties start rolling into the Psycho Center and Kev tries to run away at the first sight of the violent wounds. His mother forces him to stay and work. He is so shaky he can\u2019t hold a sponge to clean the blood off a person that is missing half of their face and drops it, accidentally pushing his fingers into the bloody wound. Touching the wound this way cures it completely. Kev quickly grows into a famous sensation who is able to heal any wounds. He is the only person on Earth with this psi-ability, and there is a special clinic built just for him. Lucie becomes his assistant. Presidents and generals visit him and present him with medals and honors. After four months, the war ends and peace returns to Earth. The Vice President thanks Kev on behalf of the country.\n"}
{"id": "49838_1", "pid": "49838_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28709, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin is the only member of the Faraday family without psi-powers. His two brothers, sister, mother, and father are all extremely powerful individuals, but he, at the ripe age of 26 years old, had nothing. Because of this, he was considered an outcast and was forced to work in their home instead of in the outside world. People pitied him and looked down on him, which drove him crazy. The story begins at the breakfast table with Danny using his powers to levitate food in and out of the kitchen. Chaos ensues as the orange juice crashes into his sister, Sylvia, who senses Kevin\u2019s displeasure at his brazen use of psi-power. Their father soon appears out of thin air with his briefcase, while his mother strolls down and instantly reads Kevin\u2019s mind, only making him madder. The situation escalates until Tim, the youngest, strolls in and claims that Kevin\u2019s powers have yet to present themselves, which gives Kevin hope. His family leaves for work, and Kevin is left at home alone again. \nKevin watches the servomechanisms as they clean and manage the house. Of course, sometimes they break down and he is needed, but largely he has nothing to do and is bored. In the year 2102, Kevin Faraday was considered useless. He takes a long walk that day, and when he returns home, his family is buzzing with the news. A spaceship returned from Alpha Centauri claiming they ran into inhabitable planets filled with humanoid aliens. One of the aliens followed them back to Earth, then turned around and headed home. They were hostile creatures and attacked them on sight. Earth had six months to prepare for the potential of war, so Kevin and his siblings learned first-aid techniques at the Psycho Center. There, Kevin meets Lucy, a cute blonde poetess who expresses interest in him. \nWhen the first bomb strikes, Kevin is faced with his first injured patient. His face had been blown up in the explosion, and Kevin can\u2019t handle the sight, so he tries to run away. He is stopped by his mother, however, who scolds him and sends him back to his patient. As he is mopping his face with a sponge, his hand slips and he accidentally touches his patient skin-to-skin. Miraculously, his injuries are cured, and Kevin\u2019s powers are finally discovered. He is a healer. \nHe heals the rest of the injured with just a touch and soon becomes the most important man in the world. He gets his own special hospital, where Lucy is his assistant, and visits from Presidents, cabinet members, and other people of power. He heals everyone who is injured in the war and loves the new attention. He is the only healer, and those who had his abilities in the past were kings. \nHowever, four months later, the war ends and the Centaurions blow themselves up in surrender. The story ends with a question: will Kevin still be as needed in a post-war society? \n"}
{"id": "49838_2", "pid": "49838_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Tim's role in the family.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28713, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tim is Kevin's youngest brother, and works as a meteorologist for the Weather Bureau. His ability is that of prognostication, meaning he is able to predict certain things about the future. This includes positive and negative things. For instance, at the beginning of the story, he feels a sense of impending doom. At the same time, he is the only one who has a positive outlook on Kevin's situation: he suspects that Kevin has a power that hasn't been discovered or isn't well-understood yet, but the rest of the family (including Kevin himself) figure that he doesn't have any special abilities at all. This is particularly contrasted with Kevin's mother, who doesn't ever speak highly of Kevin. Tim's encouragement gives Kevin hope for his own future regularly, and it helps him to know that someone is nice to him and doesn't think he is useless. "}
{"id": "49838_2", "pid": "49838_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Tim's role in the family.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28713, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tim is the youngest brother in the family, and he has the unique gift of prognostication. Because of his ability to see into the future, Tim has gainful employment with the Weather Bureau. Compared to the rest of the family, Tim treats Kevin kindly and tells him that he believes he does have some special power; society simply hasn't developed a test to identify it yet. At breakfast, Tim also feels a sense of ominousness surrounding Kevin, which foreshadows the alien war that happens after the discovery of the Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri and Kevin's important role in it. Because of his training in first-aid, Kevin works to help those injured in the war, and in the process, he discovers his ability to physically heal people with a simple touch of his hands. Tim's prediction that Kevin would discover his innate power gave Kevin hope and also came true."}
{"id": "49838_2", "pid": "49838_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Tim's role in the family.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28713, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tim has the supernatural power of prognostication, and quickly rose to a high position as a meteorologist at the Weather Bureau. He has the same looks as the other men of the Faraday family - big and blond. \nTim defends Kev in the family when the rest of the siblings are picking on him about not having any supernatural powers (\u201cpsi-powers\u201d). Tim says Kev must have a power they haven\u2019t learned to test for yet, giving Kev a little boost of hope. Tim has a nagging sense that Kev has an ability they haven\u2019t discovered yet and senses an ominousness in his future. Because of Tim\u2019s supernatural ability to forecast the future, he foreshadows the discovery of Kev\u2019s ability to heal.\n"}
{"id": "49838_2", "pid": "49838_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Tim's role in the family.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28713, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tim is the youngest of the Faraday family, but his power and talent are still remarkable, perhaps even more so due to his age. Like his brothers and his father, Tim is blonde and large and looked older than his siblings. Tim is a prognosticator, meaning he is able to sense things in the future. He works at the Weather Bureau and quickly rose to the top thanks to his supernatural ability. \nTim is the peacekeeper in the family. His foreboding senses told him long ago that Kevin has psi-powers, they just hadn\u2019t been discovered that. Tim\u2019s predictions give Kevin hope and keep him from going crazy. As well, he seems like the least dramatic of all the siblings and knows how to de-escalate any situation. \n"}
{"id": "49838_3", "pid": "49838_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the circumstances that led to Kevin's power not being discovered until he was twenty-six years old.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28787, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "n the year 2102, when this story takes place, 95% of the population has psi-powers. Because of the advancement of technology and medicine, physical ailments are easily and quickly remedied. There is even a cure-all that can heal most things, so it is not often that sickness or injury is relevant to life in the society that Kevin and his family live in. However, everything changes when an alien race from Alpha Centauri wages war on the humans. Unknown weapons mean unknown damage, and injury is out of the humans' control. Because Kevin does not have any psi-powers, he is encouraged to learn first aid so that he can be useful during the war. He is expected to be especially good at first aid because he does not feel the emotions of the injured in the way that telepaths do, and thus he should be able to stay more level-headed. However, he is even more effective in first aid that anyone imagined, because when he touches an injured person they heal almost instantaneously. What usually takes days with cure-all is achieved in mere seconds with a touch of Kevin's hand. It is not only the lack of violence that led to Kevin's power going unnoticed: he is the only person in the world with his powers, which makes it incredibly rare, instead of just being a power that nobody was looking for. "}
{"id": "49838_3", "pid": "49838_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the circumstances that led to Kevin's power not being discovered until he was twenty-six years old.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28787, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hundreds of years prior to the action of the story, human experimentation with nuclear energy released radiation into the air that caused people to develop psi powers, turning them \"into a race of supermen.\" By 2102, the year the story takes place, most people have some kind of unique ability, the most common of which is telepathy. This quality, coupled with the fact that viral disease and sickness have largely been eradicated, has led to the creation of a well-ordered society unused to violence and large-scale suffering. There are places called \"cure-alls\", which help people with physical ailments, but since such issues are rare, cure-alls are also limited. There are transplants and grafts for things like missing arms and legs in this new world, but there is no such treatment for psi-deficiencies. As a psi-negative, Kevin feels like an outcast in his family and in society in general. He struggles to understand what his purpose is until war comes to Earth in the form of a hostile group of aliens from two newly-discovered planets near Alpha Centauri. Kevin trains in first-aid in order to offer assistance to the war-wounded, and in the process, he discovers he has the ability to heal people physically by simply touching them with his hands."}
{"id": "49838_3", "pid": "49838_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the circumstances that led to Kevin's power not being discovered until he was twenty-six years old.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28787, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the story, Earth had not had war in well over a hundred years and all viruses had been eradicated. The planet was peaceful because there were so many telepaths that there was no longer any capacity for war or crime. Humans started showing these supernatural powers around the 1960s when nuclear energy was being developed. The powers were present, but latent, in humans until brought to life by nuclear radiation. \nBecause Earth was such a peaceful place, attending medical casualties was rare and it was never a career that Kevin had the opportunity to explore. However, after humans discover two earth-like planets in Alpha Centauri and the aliens retaliate and attack Earth, casualties start rolling into the town the Faraday family lives in. Kevin is prepared since he was rapidly trained in the field of medicine on the insistence of his mother who recognized that there would not be enough people with the relevant medical knowledge to treat war casualties should the aliens attack. However, Kevin tries to run away at the first sight of a gaping wound. His mother forces him to stay, and he reluctantly begins shakily sponging the wound of a victim missing half of their face with water. He accidentally drops the sponge and plunges his fingers into the wound, disgusting him greatly. His mother notices immediately that Kevin has healed the wounds completely without scarring. This is the first discovery of Kevin\u2019s psi-power of healing, and he is the only person on Earth to have this ability. If it weren\u2019t for the aliens attacking Earth and creating many casualties, Kevin would not have discovered his extremely rare psi-power.\n"}
{"id": "49838_3", "pid": "49838_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the circumstances that led to Kevin's power not being discovered until he was twenty-six years old.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28787, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin\u2019s long-undiscovered power is healing, which was largely useless in their society. The cure-all was invented before his birth and advanced technology meant illness, disease, and injuries were few and far between. If someone were injured or ill, they were taken to the health center in another town that contained a cure-all machine. This machine could cure anything within a few days. Frankly, his powers were not needed until the war came around. Since he did not grow up around physically hurt people, he was unable to discover his power until he placed his hands on an injured soldier. "}
{"id": "49838_4", "pid": "49838_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are people without psi-powers seen in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin thinks he is one of the 5% of the population that does not have psi-powers, and we can learn a lot about how society sees this group of people by his interactions with his peers and his family. Before realizing he had powers, Kevin had to stay at home to take care of the house. His family knew that he would not be able to make much money in any kind of job without powers, and it would shame their family for him to be working one of those jobs. Even when he is at home, he's often referred to as slow or useless. He has never had many friends because his peers hated playing sports with him, since they couldn't communicate with their minds, and so Kevin was always at a disadvantage. Similarly, even though he was likeable, girls never wanted to date him. He was also left out of other aspects of society, because a lot of news was delivered via \"tellies\" which is received through psi-powers, so he often has to learn about the goings-on in the society from his family. Kevin learns firsthand how big of a difference it meant for how he was treated once he realized he did have powers after all."}
{"id": "49838_4", "pid": "49838_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are people without psi-powers seen in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "People without psi powers are called psi-deficients or classified as psi-negative. They are unique in a society dominated by individuals who developed superpowers over time because of the proliferation of nuclear radiation in Earth's air. Such superpowers include telekinesis, prognostication, teleportation, and most prominently, telepathy. Almost every psi-powered individual has some amount of telepathic ability, and they can also protect themselves from interference by others with the same ability by using a mind shield. Psi-deficient individuals do not have any kind of superpower, so they are susceptible to the whims of those who do have such powers. For example, Kevin cannot read the minds or emotions of his family members, and he cannot protect his own mind or emotions from being probed by his mother and sister. Because of his lack of psi power, most of his family treats him with condescension. They tip-toe around his feelings and fail to really engage with him. Kevin does not feel loved or even liked by most of them, except his brother Tim, who offers him hope by suggesting he will discover his power sometime in the future. This is true for psi-deficients in general. They are viewed as \"throwbacks to an earlier era\" when disease and sickness crippled people in a disorderly society. Because psi-deficients have a harder time adjusting to this new society, they are seen as a kind of burden."}
{"id": "49838_4", "pid": "49838_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are people without psi-powers seen in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "People without psi-powers are considered imbeciles and generally little use to society. Before Kev discovers his psi-power, he describes staying at home and \u201cwatching the house\u201d as his only real contribution to the family. People with psi-powers can do things so much more quickly and efficiently than those without, that people like Kev have little chance of holding jobs in this society.\nKevin describes how most psi-powers come with the ability to put up mental shields to stop the mind from being probed. Without psi-powers, the mind is completely transparent to mental probing by telepathy, meaning their thoughts are never private. \nThere are television-like telepathic projections in the society called \u201ctellies\u201d that can\u2019t be received by people without psi-powers, isolating them from current events like the discovery of the inhabited alien planets in Alpha Centauri. Kevin only learns about the discovery reported on the tellies from his siblings who have psi-powers.\n"}
{"id": "49838_4", "pid": "49838_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nHow are people without psi-powers seen in this society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Individuals who are born with psi-powers, only five percent of the general population, are truly looked down upon in this society. After radioactive testing and explosions brought out the latent psi-powers in people, society quickly changes to accommodate these superhumans. Therefore, those that don\u2019t fit into this society are outcasts, pitied, and often seen as failures by the rest of their family. Kevin is a perfect example. Before he discovered his powers, he was unable to work a menial job due to the shame it would bring his family. So, instead, he read books the primitive way, took walks around the park since he was unable to play sports thanks to his lack of psi-powers, and managed the machines that did all the housework. He truly served no purpose in society and felt great bitterness because of it. "}
{"id": "49838_5", "pid": "49838_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Kevin and his mother\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28733, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin's mother is a psychiatrist, but she does not want to diagnose her own family member, so she has to entrust Kevin's care to people outside the household. There is a lot of tension between Kevin and his mother at the beginning of the story, and she feels sorry for him whenever he feels hope for the future. It seems that the family knows she can feel the specific thoughts but they don't think she can necessarily where they're coming from, and doesn't have context for these feelings. Even though he is slower at some things than his siblings, his mom encourages him to get trained for first-aid once they know a war is coming; in some sense, he finally has a chance to directly contribute to society, according to his mom, and wouldn't be useless anymore. She also thinks he might have an advantage since he won't feel the others' pain as much. After Kevin finds out that he does have powers, his mom seems to be trying to make up for lost time, trying to bond with him, because she recognizes him as useful now, and is no longer indifferent (or even directly mean) towards him. \n"}
{"id": "49838_5", "pid": "49838_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Kevin and his mother\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28733, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin's mother is a psychiatrist at the Psycho Center with strong telepathic ability. She can read Kevin's mind from the kitchen when he is sitting in the dining room. Although Kevin's mother clearly harbors a bias against psi-deficient people, she also rejects some of the technological advancements of the new society, including the robocooks. Instead, she prefers to cook her own food. Like Kevin's other family members, Kevin's mother walks on eggshells around Kevin, never really truly engaging with him other than to remind the other children to not insult him for his deficiency. As a psychiatrist, his mother won't officially diagnose Kevin herself, but she wants him to make an appointment at the Psycho Center to help him because better adjusted to society. Kevin becomes emotionally disconnected from other people thanks to his own parents' emotional distance from him, and this lack of communication leads them to not understand each other very well. When Earth begins to anticipate war with the aliens from planets near Alpha Centauri, Kevin's mother orders him to train in first-aid in order to contribute. Since the world lacks hospitals because of the exponential decrease in sickness and disease, they have to turn the Psycho Center into a makeshift hospital. This is where Kevin discovers his power to heal people by touching them with his hands. When his mother witnesses his new ability, she is proud to call him her son and reminds him that the leaders of the old world had a similar ability. This encourages Kevin to use his newly-found power for the good of humanity."}
{"id": "49838_5", "pid": "49838_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Kevin and his mother\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28733, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin\u2019s mother (Amy) reluctantly accepts that her son lacks supernatural (psi-power) abilities after he undergoes all possible medical tests and psychological evaluations. Kev feels disconnected and like a disappointment to his mother and the rest of his family. His mother is telepathic, and uses this power to probe Kev\u2019s mind and read his thoughts without permission. She encourages Kev to not get his hopes up when Tim, his prognosticating brother, declares that Kev must have a psi-power they have not discovered a test for yet. When the potential for alien attack becomes apparent and she decides to train as many medics as possible to treat casualties, she surprises herself by choosing to bring Kev along because it is a job even someone without powers can do. \nTheir relationship totally changes when Kevin discovers his psi-power of healing - the greatest gift of all. When his mother witnesses him healing a casualty of the alien attack for the first time at the Psycho Center, she is shocked and apologizes for ever doubting Kevin. She tells him that he has a gift, and looks at him with a pride that he has not before felt from her.\n"}
{"id": "49838_5", "pid": "49838_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJack of No Trades\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by CAVAT\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!\n \n\n \n I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n \n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n \n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.\n \n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n \n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age\u2014he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n \n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself\u2014picking on poor Kev.\"\n \n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n \n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get\u2014or so I believed\u2014their true attitude toward me.\n \n How else could I tell?\n \n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n \n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n\"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n \n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n\"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n \n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n \n \n\n \n \"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please.\"\n \n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n \n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n \n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n \n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n \n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n \n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him\u2014 stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n \n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it, Sylvia.\"\n \n I grinned. \"That's right\u2014I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall.\"\n \n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to probe anyone without permission.\"\n \n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\" she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia\u2014poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n \n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n \n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family\u2014that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.\n \n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n \n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?\"\n \n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\n \n \n\n \n Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it\u2014which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me\u2014psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n \n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n \n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n \n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n \n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n \n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.\n \n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n \n \"Well, that's perfectly natural\u2014\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.\n \n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out.\"\n \n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew\u2014as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.\n \n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\n \n \n\n \n I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but\u2014\"\n \n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n \n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n \n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\n \n \n\n \n Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared\u2014he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.\n \n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them\u2014partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.\n \n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house.\"\n \n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n \n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n \n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive\u2014artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power\u2014but I couldn't even do anything like that.\n \n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me\u2014I could see that\u2014they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\n \n \n\n \n I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago\u2014before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we \u2014in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n \n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n \n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around\u2014not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought\u2014I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?\n \n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be\u2014a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n \n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland\u2014or, rather, pseudo-woodland\u2014surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n \n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\n \n \n\n \n On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.\n \n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n \n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n \n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n \n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n\"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n \n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n\"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n \n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n \n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n \n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n \n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements\u2014if such were its intention\u2014in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.\n \n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.\n \n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.\n \n \n\n \n \"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain.\"\n \n I looked at her.\n \n \"It is an ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n \n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n \n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation\u2014even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours\u2014and the war was on.\n \n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities\u2014normal human abilities, rather.\n \n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n \n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n \n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n \n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.\n \n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!\"\n \n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive\u2014just a poetess\u2014so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.\n \n However, when the actual bombs\u2014or their alien equivalent\u2014struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene\u2014I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact\u2014and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.\n \n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\" she said, \" you certainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in the you .\n \n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on\u2014now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\n \n \n\n \n Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n \n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n \n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all\u2014just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.\n \n \"Wha\u2014wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n \n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too\u2014too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.\n \n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n \n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.\n \n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n \n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son\u2014\" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it\u2014\"the greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n \n I felt ... well, good.\n \n \n\n \n \"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n\"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it.\"\n \n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n \n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n \n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess.\"\n \n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n \n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.\n \n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n \n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n \n \"I\u2014I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.\n \n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now\u2014\" I clapped her arm\u2014\"there's a job to be done.\"\n \n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.\n \n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n \n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were\u2014well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.\n \n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out\u2014during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets\u2014and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\n \n \n\n \n The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.\n \n Plenty of people did come to see me officially\u2014the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.\n \n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\" Lucy asked me one day.\n \n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n \n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n \n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are you jealous, Lucy?\"\n \n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and\u2014\"\n \n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you mean\u2014\"\n \n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n \n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.\n \n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary\u2014only the Vice President this time\u2014had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Kevin and his mother\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28667, "query_start_index": 28669, "query_end_index": 28733, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kevin\u2019s mother, Amy, is a psychiatrist and a deep-probe telepath, meaning she only has to glance at Kevin to read exactly what\u2019s passing through his mind at that moment. Since Kevin is psi-deficient and her only child to be that way, their relationship is rather strained. The rest of her children are very talented individuals and hold important jobs, even the youngest Tim. Kevin, on the other hand, works at home watching over the machines that do the housework for them. In some ways, Amy both resents and pities him for his lack of powers. \nKevin feels the tension and acts out because of it. As can be seen at the breakfast table, he feels violated by his mother\u2019s ability and his inability to defend himself against her. As well, she clearly has no sympathy for his cause and tells him to make himself useful when the war comes. He trains in first-aid, but at the sight of his first patient who had half his face ripped off, he tries to run away. His mother stops him and scolds him, claiming that if all the telepaths can handle the pain, he can at least look at him. He heals him with his touch and discovers his psi-power. Soon, Kevin becomes the most important man in the world thanks to his healing ability and is irreplaceable in the war. \n"}
{"id": "50827_1", "pid": "50827_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31355, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Steffens and his crew, including Lieutenant Ball, are exploring the dead (uninhabited) fourth planet of the star called Tybanon in the Coal Sack Nebula. They are on a Mapping Command sent from Earth to explore new planets, assess them for life-forms and evaluate the ability of human colonization.\nThis planet is peculiar because it contains stone building structures that are over 15,000 years old. Steffens and Ball discuss the profound realization that to be that old, the alien race that erected them must be quite advanced, with interstellar travel while humans were still throwing spears around. They conclude there were castaways stranded on the planet that were then evacuated since they could find no other traces of civilization besides the structures.\nThey begin mystery-solving, wondering if the race evacuated to a different planet. The readings from the system indicate that there are moons, and the Third planet has a suitable temperature range for life, but has a CO2 atmosphere. They take their ship down to cruising altitude on the Third planet and find cities that have all been obliterated into black craters at least three miles in diameter and very deep. They are shaken, and then Steffens spots the most perfect robots he has ever seen. They are black plastic, expertly crafted, have hanging arms and legs and move with a gliding motion. \nHe is forbidden by League Law from contacting planet-bound races. He is not clear if robots are a race (sentient robots are banned on Earth) and thinks that he could be in trouble whether he contacts them or not. Contacting them if they are a race would be bad, and also he would be dismissed for not fulfilling his mapping duties if they aren\u2019t a race. As he wonders, the robots contact the humans telepathically, urging them to land since their only desire is to serve and sending a visual of a robot extending a handshake.\nSteffens decides not to reach out to the Alien Contact branch, and makes contact and lands on the planet. The robots are disappointed when the humans land, but show examples of caring for them like cleaning up the radiation so that the humans can feel more comfortable, and spreading their robot bodies out across the planet because they themselves are radioactive.\nThe humans spend three weeks gathering knowledge of the planet. Steffens begins to inquire about their origins and finds they were constructed by \u201cMakers\u201d who are no longer on the planet, but that the robots believe will return. They were disappointed when the humans landed because they did not communicate telepathically and so could not be the makers. The robots also have Factories on the planet where they are constructed. The story ends with Steffens feeling an irony that he wishes to discover who made the robots, but asking them who their Makers are would be like asking a human who created their god - an impossible question.\n"}
{"id": "50827_1", "pid": "50827_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31355, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Steffens, leader of the Mapping Command, led his crew to the Coal Sack Nebula and landed on Tyban IV. There, they discover the buildings left behind by an ancient civilization. Made out of native stone, the buildings were worn away by winds and times and were built on a raised rock. Lieutenant Ball and his geologists estimate that the rock was cut at least 15,000 years ago, 14,700 years before humans took to space. Ball and Steffens discuss the other planets in the Nebula, but none are fit to host human life. Still, they check each one out until they reach the hot one. This planet was radioactive and absolutely incapable of hosting life, however, as they got closer, Steffens could see a giant hole in the center. The site of an explosion, and all that remained was rubble. The image is up on the main screen for the whole crew to see, and they watch in amazement. Steffens sees movement in the rubble, and orders his crew to move the ship closer. He sees a black robot, and then two, as does the rest of his crew. Ball, who fell in the sudden movement, comes to Steffens, and they throw around ideas as to what these robots could be. Suddenly, a calm voice speaks to them telepathically, welcoming them to their planet and claiming they only wish to serve. A picture appeared then of a robot extending one of its hands. \nSteffens asks for permission to land, and so they do. He leaves the ship first, wearing his radiation suit, and is greeted by a large amount of slightly disappointed robots. He waves it off and soon the other members of his crew join them. Elb, the first robot to speak, explains their telepathic abilities and apologizes for violating their minds. They talk for a little while until Steffens asks where the Makers are. The robots answer sadly, saying that the Makers left a long time ago but would return. Steffens believes the Makers are dead, caught in the crossfire of the explosion, but he doesn\u2019t say so. The robots then showed his crew the Factory, which they reached by skiff. It was a large, gray building that pumped out robots left and right. \nThe Mapping Command stayed on this planet for several weeks, discovering more about this alien culture. However, the radioactive nature of the planet made it impossible for any man to stay outside the ship for long. However, one day, Steffens emerges to realize the robots effectivelyd econtaminated the area overnight. \nElb and Steffens discuss their meaning of life and what they were built to do. He realizes the Makers are like God to these robots, and he smiles at the irony. The story ends on a cliffhanger, however, claiming that that was the last time Steffens would smile on this planet. \n"}
{"id": "50827_1", "pid": "50827_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31355, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Steffens and Lieutenant Ball find themselves in a very old city on a planet far from Earth, which was the first piece of proof humans had found of another advanced race in the three hundred years humans had been in space. There is something curious about the ruins of the old city built from stone, because the humans wouldn't have expected a colony to establish a presence there. They find another city on a nearby planet with a three-mile-wide scorch mark that looked like it had decimated the city. The men detect high levels of radiation, and know nothing alive is left. They decide to explore here as well, when Steffens spots a small black robot on the surface, which makes him jump the ship back up, opening up sight to a whole field of robots, which baffled the crew. They don't know if they are entirely mechanical, how long they'd been there, or where they came from. All of a sudden, the members of the crew hear the robots talking to them in a greeting, and then plant a moving picture in everyone's mind, which startles the crew. Steffens requests permission to land, and everyone realizes how many robots there really are. Steffens is surprised that the robots seem less interested in the humans once Steffans has gotten off of their ship, which makes everyone uncomfortable. The robots explain that the humans do not understand their real nature and wanted to inform them, and they promise not to intrude on thoughts anymore without consent. Steffens notices some symbols on the robot he had met, which look identical to the markings on the other robots, though he is unsure of their importance. The more he interacts with the robots, the more Steffans finds their presence likeable and comforting. Nobody is able to determine if the robots are entirely mechanical, or if there are organic components. The robots explain that they only other living structures they are familiar with are \"the Makers\" who created the robots. The Makers have not been present for a long time, making Steffens suspect that the robots had been involved in the war he had just seen evidence of. Steffens learns that the lifespan of the robots is about 55 years, but the robots are of various ages; they are built by \"the Factory\", which was built by the Makers. The humans stay for a few weeks, learning what they can, trading knowledge. Once the robots understand the point of the radiation suits, they decontaminate the area to make it safe for the humans, though they themselves remain radioactive. Elb, the lead robot, explains that the robots' main goal is to expand knowledge which will serve the Makers. The conversation gets tense as Elb recognizes that Steffens doesn't think the Makers are coming back, so they talk about society and faith.  Steffens explains the concept of God, which the robots find varies far more for humans than the idea of the Makers does for them."}
{"id": "50827_1", "pid": "50827_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31355, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Steffens and his crew work for Mapping Command; their mission is to closely examine unexplored areas, check for life-forms, and determine whether sites are suitable for human habitation. They are currently exploring and recording information about the four planets of the star named Tyban in the Coal Sack Nebula. They find stone buildings still standing on the fourth planet but no signs of previous life. The smoothness of the stones leads them to conclude the buildings are approximately 15,000 years old. The men are amazed that space-borne beings were in this part of the Galaxy at the time when men on Earth were throwing spears at each other. They have numerous questions about the race, why there is no sign of them, and what happened to them. Lacking any way to answer these questions, they decide to move on.\n\tFlying over the fourth planet, the crew sees the remains of several cities, each destroyed by a blast that ruined the buildings. They see movement and realize it is a robot looking up at the ship; then they see more robots. At first, Steffens is undecided about what to do. League Law prohibits contact with planet-bound species, but these are robots, not living beings. Steffens decides they can legally interact with the robots, and then one of them communicates a message to him, greeting him and assuring him they do not mean any harm. It also sent a picture of one of the robots with its right arm extended for a handshake. Steffens senses the robot could control his mind if it wanted to and decides to communicate back, asking for permission to land.\n\tSteffens takes a skiff to the planet and is greeted by a robot holding out its hand for a handshake and welcoming him. Steffens signals the Aliencon men on the skiff to deplane and join him, and the robots reveal that they can read the humans\u2019 minds but are limiting their access to what is needed to communicate with them. Steffens signals his ship to land, and more robots come into view. The robots are friendly and pleasant, even relaxing to be around. They explain they had never encountered humans before, just themselves and their Makers who had lived there and created the factory that builds the robots. The robots were built to serve the Makers, and the factory is still producing them so that now there are nine million of them. \n\tElb, the robot who stays with Steffen, asks and answers questions and explains that the robots spend their time building their knowledge to be better able to serve their Makers when they return. Elb detects that Steffens thinks the Makers will not return and says they believe they will; otherwise, why were they built? Steffens compares their Makers to God because the robots believe the Makers created them, their planet, and the universe.\n"}
{"id": "50827_2", "pid": "50827_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story opens in the Coal Sack Nebula, on the uninhabited fourth planet of a star called Tyban. There are twelve 15,000 year old stone buildings on the dusty uninhabitable planet, the first evidence of another advanced space-crossing alien race.\nSteffens and his crew travel to the Third planet in the Tyban solar system which seems uninhabited as well, with the cities obliterated into black holes in the ground that are at least three miles wide. The Third planet is Earth-like, with continents, hills and deserts, and of a suitable temperature for life, but with absolutely no vegetation, deathly radiation for humans, and a CO2 atmosphere. They see splintered walls and wreckage, but no life - until their discovery of the robots. There are nine million black, plastic robots slightly shorter than humans on the planet, and they have a huge, grey block building Factory near the edge of the twilight zone in a valley between two mountains where they are produced. Their desire for their human-like Makers to return to them, and their use of telepathic communication and mind-probing sets an eerie vibe over the humans\u2019 exploration of the planet.\n"}
{"id": "50827_2", "pid": "50827_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Orphans of the World by Michael Shaara takes place on two different planets in the Coal Sack Nebula. The first is Tyban IV. There, Steffens and his crew discover the remnants of an ancient, alien civilization from at least over 15,000 years ago. They built stone buildings, worn away with time, out of the native materials sourced on the planet. The next planet they visited was hot and radioactive, absolutely unable to support any humanoid life form. However, when they got closer to the surface, Steffens and his crew noticed a giant hole in the center, charred and burnt. All the buildings within had perished in the explosion and nothing remained but a pile of rubble. The planet itself was hot and dry without any plants or wildlife. There is also a Factory on it, a large, gray building, where the robots are created. "}
{"id": "50827_2", "pid": "50827_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes place in space, where a group of humans is traveling on a ship in the Coal Sack Nebula. The star Tyban is the \"sun\", so to speak, of the relevant planets, and the humans start their journey on the fourth planet of this system, standing in the ruins of a destroyed city that did not leave them many details to learn from. The third planet of the system, one in from the first one they were on, had more information for them. There was a city abandoned much like the one they had found on the fourth planet, but the huge scorch mark that covered the city made it look like its destruction had been very violent. On this third planet, there was no oxygen, a lot of heat, and it didn't seem like it would be able to support any kind of life, especially since it had high levels of radiation. There was a valley with the factory in it, far away from the city. Much to the surprise of the human crew, there is a large swarm of black robots that seem to be the only connection to the planet. "}
{"id": "50827_2", "pid": "50827_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\n\tThe story is set in the Coal Sack Nebula on the dead fourth and third planets of a star named Tyban. The fourth planet, Tyban IV, is only one parsec from Varius II and has 12 stone buildings with no airlocks, despite the thin atmosphere, or inscriptions\u2014any that were made would have presumably been removed by the winds blowing across the planet. The stones themselves have worn smooth, so based on the timeframe for wind erosion on Earth, Captain Steffens estimates the buildings might be 10 to 15 thousand years old. This discovery is significant because humans have been exploring space for 300 years, and this is the first sighting of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. The planet has a sandy surface and a blue-black mid-day sky. Of the other three planets, the inner is too hot for habitation and the outer too heavy and cold. \nThe third planet has a decent temperature range but a carbon dioxide atmosphere. The planet is surrounded by a layer of clouds and a misty gas; it is a heavy planet with no free oxygen, but there are several dead cities, each destroyed by a blast in the center, leaving a deep hole three miles wide and shattered, splintered walls. There is no vegetation, and the planet has lethal radiation levels that would prevent any life. The surface features rocky hills. This planet, however, has millions of active robots produced in a factory that is still operational. The robots have telepathic abilities and communicate with the people on the ship, inviting them to land. The robot factory was built by what the robots refer to as Makers, who have since left the planet and not returned. The robots have the ability to decontaminate the radiation and are slightly radioactive themselves.\n"}
{"id": "50827_3", "pid": "50827_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the irony of the \u201cMakers\u201d in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31372, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The \u201cMakers\u201d are to the robots as gods of creation are to humans. The robots believe that the Makers wouldn\u2019t have created them if they wouldn\u2019t return for them one day, and so steadfastly believe that the Makers will visit. They tell Steffens that the Makers were similar to his human form. This is evidenced by the disappointment the robots display when the humans land and the robots realize they do not communicate telepathically, thus cannot be the Makers they were expecting.\nSteffens states the \u201cironic parallel\u201d of the Makers at the end of the story because the humans wish to understand who created the robots, but they can\u2019t possibly answer that question because it would be like asking a human who created their god.\n"}
{"id": "50827_3", "pid": "50827_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the irony of the \u201cMakers\u201d in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31372, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The \u201cMakers\u201d are humanoid aliens from over 15,000 years ago. They built the robots currently living on the radioactive wasteland to serve their every need. However, when their civilization was destroyed in the war, nothing remained of them aside from their robots. The robots idolize their Makers since they quite literally created them as well as the universe they exist in. Steffens draws the parallel between the robots\u2019 Makers and humans\u2019 God. He considers asking them who made the Makers, but then realizes that would be like asking who made God. "}
{"id": "50827_3", "pid": "50827_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the irony of the \u201cMakers\u201d in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31372, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Makers were the race of people who had built the robots that the humans discover in the story. When the humans visit the planet, the robots are the only moving things on the surface: it seems that the Makers were likely destroyed in whatever radioactive explosion destroyed their city. The robots, when probing the minds of the humans, found the idea of the Maker to be the God of Earth, and tried to make connections between the two ideas. Much in the same way, the Maker of any sort had been responsible for building the creatures that lived to serve it. Unfortunately, given the evidence of some kind of war, the humans don't think the Makers are going to return to the planet they are visiting, which means that the robots will be working forever to serve the Makers who they will not see again; that is, they will never meet their makers. Even though their goals are based on self-improvement, they have no way of knowing if the main source of their motivation is even real anymore. It could also easily be confusing, if the humans asked where the Makers came from, because Steffens did not want to confuse the robots by asking them who the God of their own God was, so to speak. "}
{"id": "50827_3", "pid": "50827_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the irony of the \u201cMakers\u201d in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31372, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\n\tThe irony of the Makers is that they are the robots\u2019 God and parallel to the human concept of God. Just as human theology holds that God created the universe and humans, in the robots\u2019 understanding, the Makers created them, the planet, and the universe. There are other parallels as well; Christianity teaches that God dwelled among humans in his human form as Jesus. The Makers lived among the robots. Jesus was crucified and dead for three days until he returned to life and the people who knew him. Likewise, the Makers are gone, yet the robots fully expect them to return. Human theology teaches that God created humans to worship him and serve him; the Makers created the robots to serve them. In the absence of their Makers, the robots expectantly await their return just as Christians await the second coming of Jesus.\n\tFurthermore, the robots want to please their Makers and serve them the best they can. For this reason, in the Makers\u2019 absence, the robots have worked to improve themselves, learning what they can about natural science and mathematics. When Elb probes Steffens\u2019s mind to learn more about matter, his purpose is to enhance their knowledge. Likewise, humans seek to gain more knowledge about God and his teachings to serve God better.\n\tIt is also ironic that Steffens concludes that the Makers died in a war due to the ruined cities they discovered, but he doesn\u2019t want to harm the robots\u2019 faith in the return of their Makers. \n\t\n"}
{"id": "50827_4", "pid": "50827_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what the robots are.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31354, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The robots are the first evidence of an advanced alien race that man has discovered in 300 years of interstellar travel. They are at least a foot shorter than the humans, with an eye-band circling their entire head, bunches of hanging arms, and a gliding type of locomotion. Steffens remarks that they are some of the most well-built machinery he has ever seen. The robots are made of black plastic, and have rows of dense symbols engraved all over their torsos. Their communication comes to the humans telepathically, and they are fully sentient - aware of their life spans of ~55 years, and their time until death. They also have the ability to probe the minds of the humans and even urge them to make certain decisions, but they reveal they only use this to get the humans to land and will not use it further except when given permission.\nThey claim to have been made by the Makers, and exhibit the Factory where they are built to Steffens and his crew while they are on the Third planet. There are more than nine million of them in total on the planet, which astonishes the humans, and they spend their time trying to expand their knowledge to better serve their Makers when they eventually return to the planet. \n"}
{"id": "50827_4", "pid": "50827_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what the robots are.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31354, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The robots are short, black hunks of metal with several arms and legs each. They have a plastic band that circles their head, allowing them to see in every direction. They have a series of symbols that decorate the fronts of their bodies. They are telepathic robots, able to both see into the minds of others as well as communicate with them both in their language and through visual elements. They are, as is often said, built to serve, and they live in a sort of purgatory waiting for their Makers to return home. There are approximately nine million robots currently living on that planet, each with a life span of around 55 years. They are made in the Factory, which was, of course, built by the Makers. There are two types of robots: the normal ones met by Steffens and Ball, as well as the Doctors who are able to heal flesh. "}
{"id": "50827_4", "pid": "50827_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what the robots are.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31354, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The robots that Steffens spots on the third planet of the star Tyban are small and black with a vision band wrapping around the top, the rest created from black metal, with a number of sturdy legs that put them about a foot shorter than the humans. They have the ability to make the humans on the ship hear thoughts that they relay to them, and can even send images this way, which makes Steffens worry that they have mind-control abilities. They do have the ability to intrude on thoughts. It is clear to Steffens that they were built to serve those around them, and at the initial encounter they do insist that their \"only desire is to serve\". Those that they want to serve are \"the Makers\", presumably the race of people who were on the planet before the city was scorched and destroyed in some kind of radioactive explosion. It is not clear what the robots' role in this part of the history is, just that the chances of their makers coming back to them was probably very low. "}
{"id": "50827_4", "pid": "50827_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what the robots are.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31354, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The robots were designed by their Makers and produced in their factories which are still operational as there are over nine million of them of various ages and remaining lifespans. They are small, black structures with several hanging arms and legs. They have a band of transparent plastic-like material that runs around their heads; this is presumably their eye, enabling them to see in all directions. A similar round dot of the plastic on top of their heads suggests they can see directly over them. The robots are all identical and have rows of symbols on their torsos. Surprisingly, the robots appear to demonstrate emotion as they seem disappointed when they first meet Steffens, pleased when the ship lands and the crew joins them on the planet, pained when they refer to their Makers who have been gone a long time, and curious about the similarities and differences between themselves and the humans.\nCommunicating telepathically, the robots let Steffens and his crew know that they are designed to serve. It is possible that the robots can control human minds, but they choose not to do so. They let Steffens know that they only reached out to the humans\u2019 minds because they detected that the humans were going to leave, so they decided to communicate some information about themselves so that the humans would stay for a visit. They also indicate that they explored the humans\u2019 minds only enough to be able to contact and communicate with them. The robots understand human thinking: they know how to present themselves as nonthreatening, sending an image of one with an outstretched arm for a handshake and reducing the number of robots that first engage with the humans, so they won\u2019t be overwhelmed or intimidated. They also understand that their silence will draw the humans in after their initial communication and the picture, due to their curiosity. \nLeft to their own devices after their Makers left and didn\u2019t return, the robots engaged in building their knowledge of the natural sciences and mathematics. Their goal is to make themselves even more useful to their Makers when they return. The robots fully expect their Makers to return; otherwise, what would be their purpose?\n"}
{"id": "50827_5", "pid": "50827_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy does Steffens decide to engage with the robots?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31376, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Steffens was stumped as to what to do when they visually discovered robots on the Third planet. He proactively sounded an alert and put defense screens on the ship, but wondered about what his governing League Law would have him do.\nContact with races on foreign planets was forbidden, but he was unsure if robots could be called a race. Earth didn\u2019t have robots because imaginative robots were expressly forbidden to build. Steffens thought it was possible the robots were the brains of natives encased in metal.\nSince Steffens is under \u201cThe Mapping Command\u201d, he is supposed to go no further than examining unexplored systems, checking for life-forms and the possibilities of human colonization. His conundrum was that,  \u201cif he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\u201d\nThe robots reach out telepathically, saying in words that they are only here to serve, and communicating a photo to the minds of the crew of a robot extending a hand for a handshake. Although Steffens wonders about letting the Alien Contact crew handle the situation, he ultimately decides it is his responsibility - and he goes on to initiate contact by requesting to land. He is encouraged to stay and explore by the kind nature of the robots.\n"}
{"id": "50827_5", "pid": "50827_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy does Steffens decide to engage with the robots?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31376, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When Steffens and his crew flew from Tyban IV to check out this other planet, they had no idea that they would find life or even robotic humanoids on this planet. The Mapping Command is simply meant to check off boxes (was there life on this planet? Is it inhabitable for humans?), not to interact with the potential life forms below. However, Steffens is faced with a serious dilemma when he encounters the robots. He has already technically made contact by accident since he flew so close to the surface to investigate the burnt city. Whether or not he interacted with them more or flew away, he would be in trouble with the Commissioner. Contact with races is expressly forbidden, however, he wonders if robots could really be defined as a race since they were more of an invention. So, he decided to learn more about the robots by staying. "}
{"id": "50827_5", "pid": "50827_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy does Steffens decide to engage with the robots?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31376, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At first, Steffens isn't sure if he should engage with the robots because the League Law forbids contact with planet-bound races, but the robots were not necessarily a race. Because Earthmen did not have robots, they were a new type of encounter for him, and he decided that it would be okay since they had effectively already made contact. He isn't even sure if they are native beings with some kind of casing to protect their organs or even just brains from the elements, or if they are entirely robots. In the end, though, it was a Catch-22: if he made contact, he could be breaking the Law of Contact, but if he went back to base without making contact, it could be said that he did not complete his duty. "}
{"id": "50827_5", "pid": "50827_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nOrphans of the Void\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick\u2014the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!\n \n\n \n In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.\n \n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n \n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n \n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?\"\n \n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n \n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n \n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization.\"\n \n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n \n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n \n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old\u2014 too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.\n \n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n \n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n \n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native\u2014\" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet\u2014\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n \n \"How long?\"\n \n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n \n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n \n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n \n Steffens whistled.\n \n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force.\"\n \n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n \n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.\n \n Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.\n \n \n\n \n While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n \n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n \n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n \n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n\"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n \n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n \n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be\u2014\"\n \n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n \n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n \n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n \n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n \n \"How about moons?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\n \n \n\n \n The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.\n \n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.\n \n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n \n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n \n After a while he saw a city.\n \n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.\n \n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n \n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities\u2014all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n \n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.\n \n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n \n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n \n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.\n \n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the radiation suits.\"\n \n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.\n \n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n \n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\n \n \n\n \n Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.\n \n \n\n \n Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n \n Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n \n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head\u2014it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n \n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n \n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n \n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n \n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n \n \"They were.\"\n \n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.\n \n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n \n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.\n \n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n \n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n \n \" Can we go down?\"\n \n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives.\"\n \n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n \n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet\u2014the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n\"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n \n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n \n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.\n \n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.\n \n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?\n  An outpost!\n \n \n He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....\n \n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n \n \" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... \"\n \n \n\n \n \"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.\n \n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n \n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is only to serve.\"\n \n And then the robots sent a picture .\n \n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n \n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.\n \n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.\n \n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.\n \n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n \n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?\n \n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n \n \"We request\u2014we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet.\"\n \n \n\n \n Steffens had not realized that there were so many.\n \n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\n \n \n\n \n One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.\n \n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less\u2014Steffens could not understand\u2014somehow less interested , as if the robot had been\u2014expecting someone else.\n \n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission to land.\"\n \n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n \n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....\n \n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n \n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.\n \n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.\n \n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.\n \n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n \n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our\u2014custom\u2014not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real\u2014nature\u2014and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n \n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n \n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be\u2014dismayed\u2014to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must\u2014apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and\u2014understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request.\"\n \n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n \n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.\n \n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row\u2014numbers, perhaps\u2014were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n \n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\n \n \n\n \n After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n \n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.\n \n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.\n \n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n \n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n \n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?\"\n \n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but\u2014yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n \n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n \n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey\u2014I would have to examine your thought more fully\u2014but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n \n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.\n \n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are\u2014curious.\" It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n \n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a\u2014doctor\u2014and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance.\"\n \n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\" Steffens decided, were probably just that\u2014doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n \n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n \n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n \n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.\n \n \"The Makers\u2014are not here.\"\n \n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:\n \n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n \n Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n \n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.\n \n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n \n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n \n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere\u2014good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n \n Were they immortal?\n \n \n\n \n \"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n \n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.\n \n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.\n \n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n \n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n \n Steffens tried to understand that.\n \n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first\u2014letters\u2014of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n \n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n \n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of\u2014Peb\u2014is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years.\"\n \n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless\u2014\n \n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n \n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n \n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n \n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n \n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n \n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the\u2014\" another pause for a word\u2014\"by the Factory .\"\n \n \"The Factory?\"\n \n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n \n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n \n \"Would you prefer to use your\u2014skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n \n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance\u2014moving around their birthplace.\n \n \n\n \n The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.\n \n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.\n \n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.\n \n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n \n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.\n \n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n \n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.\n \n He had a vague idea of the robot's history\u2014more, perhaps, then they knew themselves\u2014but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n \n \n\n \n \"What do you do ?\" Steffens asked.\n \n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n \n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.\n \n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n \n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n \n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?\"\n \n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.\n \n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known\u2014that the Makers were gone and would never come back\u2014he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.\n \n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot\u2014a machine which did not eat or sleep\u2014listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.\n \n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n \n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n \n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning\u2014\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed\u2014\"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even\u2014\" Elb caught himself\u2014\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar\u2014\" Elb paused for a long while\u2014\"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n \n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n \n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n \n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n \n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n\nQuestion:\nWhy does Steffens decide to engage with the robots?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31313, "query_start_index": 31315, "query_end_index": 31376, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Steffens decides to engage with the robots because they seem to be openly and graciously inviting the spaceship and its men to visit them. The robots send a friendly greeting, explaining that they do not wish the humans harm and that their only desire is to serve. They also send an image of one of the robots lifting its arm and graciously offering its hand. In addition, since the robots communicate with the humans telepathically, their messages are persuasive, and Steffens feels a strong urge to take the robot\u2019s proffered hand. Another reason he decides to engage with the robots is that while the Law of Contact forbids making contact with life-forms, the robots are not life-forms, and Steffens could very well face a court-martial for dereliction of duty if he does not make contact with them. On top of that, Steffens is immensely curious about the robots and their makers."}
{"id": "50802_1", "pid": "50802_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28825, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Stationed on the Earth base of Alpha Centaurus II, Mr. Michaelson, a tall, gaunt archeologist, explores the planet for historical artifacts. He is human, but has a special cylinder embedded in the flesh behind his ear that teleports him to a different location when touched.\nHe comes across an empty city in the desert, with the old buildings filling with blown sand, though he is not alone. He is approached by a short, gray-haired native with webbed bare feet (aka webfoot or Maota) that he spotted in a doorway, who introduces himself as the keeper of the city and implores him to leave because he angers the gods. Michaelson brushes aside that spirits exist, but notes that he must keep an eye on this intelligent native.\nAs Michaelson continues to explore the city and disobey what he was told, the native again demands he leave, calling him \u201cMr. Earthgod.\u201d Michaelson learns his name is Maota, and tries to negotiate to preserve the artifacts and build a museum. Maota does not succumb to Michaelson\u2019s tactics, and whacks him unconscious with a metal book.\nMichaelson awakes and teleports to a creek 500 miles away to clean his wound, then returns and opens the book to find voices talking to him. He is mystified that the civilization here said to have disappeared half a million years ago was communicating with him. In his wonder, he picks up another clock-like artifact he has been curious about, and is shocked to feel it is radiating heat.\nThe next day, Michaelson awakes in the dead city to find Maota pointing a gun-like weapon at him - apologizing for causing him pain instead of killing him. Maota reads from the talking poetry book, at Michaelson\u2019s request. It moves them both, Michaelson feeling the humanity of the civilization, and Maota feeling the gentle spirits. Maota becomes furious that Michaelson wants to move things into a museum and begins to fire the weapon. Michaelson teleports behind him and in their struggle to take possession they discharge it - destroying the book. \nMaota has disgraced himself and the gods and becomes inconsolable. He has been wanting to try the \u201cclock\u201d device for some time - now with renewed determination because he doesn\u2019t care if it kills him. He explains that he thinks the race of the dead city entered a fourth dimension. Pushing the button, Maota\u2019s body collapses in death. Michaelson tries to bury him, but has the sense that his soul is elsewhere. Michaelson desperately studies the artifacts to understand the clock, then radically decides to just press the button too. Afterwards, he sees his dead body below him and communicates with Maota\u2019s consciousness in a spiritual dimension. He discovers that he can will his cylinder with his mind to return to his physical body, traversing between the physical and spiritual realms. This infuriates Maota who can never return to his body and feels pushed and tricked by Michaelson. \n"}
{"id": "50802_1", "pid": "50802_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28825, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michaelson is an archeologist from Earth living on Alpha Centaurus II. He discovers an ancient, hidden city that is remarkably well preserved and half a million years old. He notices an older, webfooted man watching him as he explores the ancient city. The older man, named Maota, tells Michaelson that he is trespassing in the city, which is sacred ground where the spirits may one day return. Maota identifies himself as the city's keeper and warns Michaelson that he is angering the gods. Still, Michaelson pays him little attention because he is so wrapped up in his discovery. Maota warns Michaelson to leave or be killed, but Michaelson continues to ignore Maota and collect and inspect artifacts.\n\tMichaelson talks about building a museum there, showcasing the artifacts, and inviting people to come and see everything. Extremely angry and frustrated, Maota throws one of the ancient books at Michaelson, knocking him out. Later, Michaelson studies the book, opening it and running his finger over the writing, which creates the sound of a voice\u2014the book talks! Inside a tall building, Michaelson observes a clock-like object, touching it and discovering it is warm and vibrating. Amazingly, the device is still operating.\n\tMaota returns in the morning, apologizes for hitting Michaelson, saying he should have killed him. He has brought a weapon with him. Michaelson asks Maota to read to him from the book before he kills him, and Maota agrees, telling Michaelson that it is a book of poetry. Michaelson dismisses the book as unimportant, wondering why the ancient ones didn\u2019t leave books about history or mathematics instead, but he wants to hear it read and asks Maota to read some to him. Then, Maota prepares to shoot Michaelson, but Michaelson uses his cylinder to jump behind Maota before he fires. The two wrestle over the weapon, and it fires a shot into the sand near the book. Together they dig through the sand to find the book, but it is gone. Finally, Maota says he is giving up and going away but not leaving the city. Michaelson is perplexed by the paradoxical statement, but Maota says he doesn\u2019t know enough to explain it. However, he tells Michaelson that he has read the ancient race\u2019s books and knows they conquered all diseases, explored all the mysteries of science, and devised the clock-type machine to cheat death. \n\tMaota presses the button on the clock machine, and it makes noises. Then Maota\u2019s knees buckle, and he is dead. Michaelson buries the body and continues his study of the city, learning the language and reading the books. Then he decides to use the clock device to see what it does. His body collapses, but his mind joins Maota\u2019s. Sad to see his body, Michaelson touches it and feels a vibration of life. He suspects that his cylinder is responsible for his journey, and if that\u2019s right, he should be able to use it to return. He tries, and it works.\n"}
{"id": "50802_1", "pid": "50802_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28825, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Michaelson is an archeologist from Earth who visits the ruins of an unnamed, 500,000-year-old city on Alpha Centaurus II. He uses an implant behind his ear to transport himself there instantaneously, and he excitedly explores the sand-covered streets and complex varieties of buildings he discovers. Soon after his arrival, he encounters an old man he quickly identifies as one of the webfooted natives. As he continues exploring, the native man approaches him and orders him to leave since Mr. Michaelson is trespassing on sacred ground and making the spirits angry. Mr. Michaelson refuses, and the native man threatens to kill him if he does not leave. As night falls, Michaelson continues to uncover artifacts left behind by the city\u2019s disappeared inhabitants. The native man returns to ask why Michaelson has not left as instructed, and he introduces himself as Maota; Maota believes Michaelson is a god because of his fascination with the city and its artifacts. Michaelson tries to recruit Maota into helping him preserve the city for posterity, but Maota refuses. Instead, he hits Michaelson in the head with an ancient book he is carrying. When Michaelson awakens, he uses his implant to beam to a small creek where he cleans his wound. When he returns, he discovers the book Maota had used to hit him. He believes he hears the book speaking to him in a strange language. Startled, he returns to a clock-like device he had seen earlier. When he touches the clock, he finds it warm, which frightens him. Michaelson leaves the building and falls asleep. When he awakens later, he finds Maota standing over him, who informs him the book is full of ancient poetry and then says he will kill Michaelson for not leaving the city. Michael asks Maota to read to him from the book before he dies, and Maota obliges. When the book's pages begin to blow in the wind, Maota takes this as proof of the existence of spirits. When Michaelson mocks Maota again, Maota rages and points his gun at him. Michaelson uses his implant to appear behind Maota; the two struggle for control of the gun. They accidentally shoot the book into oblivion. Because of Michaelson's implant, Maota once again believes he is a god, but Michaelson explains to him that it is artificial. Convinced that Michaelson is only human, Maota announces that he is going away, and he offers to show Michaelson how. Maota reveals that the ancient race had not died out; instead, they had used the clock-like device to transfer themselves to a kind of fourth dimension, where they could observe and communicate outside the constraints of a physical body. Maota triggers the device, and his body slumps over. Michaelson buries him and later triggers the device too, finding himself reunited with Maota in the fourth dimension. However, unlike Maota, Michaelson discovers he is able to zoom between dimensions thanks to his implant, which convinces Maota that Michaelson is a devil rather than a god."}
{"id": "50802_1", "pid": "50802_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28825, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Michaelson is a human archaeologist currently exploring Alpha Centaurus II. He comes across the ruins of an ancient city. He walks to it slowly, seeing someone in the distance, but is relieved when he realizes it\u2019s just a webfoot. He explores the city, digging through the sand and rubble to find beautiful artifacts from half a million years ago. He is soon stopped by the webfoot, who explains that Michaelson must leave immediately lest he anger the spirits. He introduces himself as keeper of the city which Michaelson finds amusing. Maota believes that the city must remain untouched so the spirits would not be lost in the darkness. He tells Michaelson to leave quickly or else he will be killed. Michaelson does not leave but continues exploring. His cylinder, a contraption worn above the ear, could transport him back home in a heartbeat, but he decides not to use it yet. Maota approaches Michaelson again, scolding him for not leaving when asked. He calls him \u201cEarthgod,\u201d and says that no human could travel the way he does. They fight about the city and whether or not to leave it alone until Maota strikes Michaelson with a book, knocking him out. \nWhen Michaelson regains consciousness, he travels to a nearby river to wash the blood out of his hair, then pops back into the city. He leafs through the book and discovers that it talks. Entering a building, Michaelson decides to reach out and touch the object that confused him most. It almost looked like a clock, but it was clearly different. It\u2019s warm to the touch. Running back outside, he passes out in the street. He wakes up to Maota standing over him with a gun. Michaelson convinces him to read some of the book aloud, which is the only poetry book in the city. Maota then attempts to kill him, but Michaelson simply travels behind Maota and punches him before he could fire. They fight for Maota\u2019s weapon until it goes off, blasting a hole in the earth. The book was destroyed in the blast. \nMaota grieves the book, and Michaelson explains how he uses the cylinder to travel. Michaelson asks Maota where he\u2019s going to go, and Maota decides to take him along. They travel to his house, and Maota points to the clock on the wall. He explains that he believes it allows people to travel to another dimension, and he has decided to use it. He pushes a button and slumps to the floor.\nMichaelson spends the next few weeks learning the ancient language and exploring the city before his curiosity got the better of him. He decides to press the button and travels through the darkness before hearing Maota\u2019s voice. He sees his body below, and Maota reveals that no one can leave this other place. Michaelson decides to use his cylinder and travels back to Alpha Centaurus II. He pushes the button again, only to hear Maota\u2019s screams. He can travel between dimensions. \n"}
{"id": "50802_2", "pid": "50802_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Alpha Centaurus II, a planet with two moons and many unknowns and dangers. There is an Earth settlement on the planet, and the archeologist, Mr. Michaelson traverses around a sandy, desert-like area under a pale blue sky come to be referred to as the dead city which was last populated half a million years ago.\nThe dead city is a complex variety of buildings, including small homes, huge ones with spires, and all varieties of square and spherical shapes. Suspension bridges connected conical towers. Desert plants grew from rooftops and sand had blown down the streets and filled the doorways. Despite not believing in the spiritual, Mr. Michaelson experiences waves of energy communicating with him from the artifacts he finds in the dead city, giving it the feel of not being deserted at all.\nThrough the discovery of an important artifact (the \u201cclock) that is radiating heat. The two characters Maota and Mr. Michaelson also discover that they can travel into a spiritual dimension setting where they look down on the planet, or anywhere in the universe, and communicate with their thoughts.\n"}
{"id": "50802_2", "pid": "50802_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Alpha Centaurus II in the ancient remains of a city heretofore unknown by humans and where there are twin moons. The half a million year old city consists of both small and large buildings, with the smaller ones presumably houses. Some of the tall buildings have spires; some are square, while others are ellipsoid or spheroid. Elegant bridges connect tall towers. The structures are well preserved, although any inscriptions that were made have long since worn away. Piles of sand fill the doorways, and desert plants grow on rooftops. Artifacts are everywhere, some buried in the sand, including bowls, statues, and even books. A clock-like object is particularly fascinating, especially after Michaelson touches it to find it warm and vibrating\u2014meaning that it is still operational. Many of the structures and objects are made of metal which has helped preserve them for such a long time. The book that Maota throws are Michaelson has metal pages and, surprisingly, speaks when Michaelson runs his fingers along the lines of text. \n\tHumans at this time have advanced technology for travel. They have invented personalized devices in the shape of a cylinder implanted behind a person's ear. With this device, the person can think of a place he wants to travel to, and the device instantly whisks him there. \n"}
{"id": "50802_2", "pid": "50802_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place in an old city on Alpha Centaurus II. Not much is revealed about the planet itself except for the fact that it has a small population of webfooted humanoids who are not actually natives but come from a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They are curious and many are quite intelligent, including Maota, whom Michaelson meets when he arrives in the city. White clouds float in a pale blue sky, and at night silver moonlight from the two moons illuminates the ruins. Five hundred miles from the city is a small creek where Michaelson washes his head wound. The city itself is covered in sand and desert plants after hundreds of thousands of years of disuse. However, the buildings remain intact and include a complex variety of small homes, spire-topped, square, ellipsoid, and spheroid buildings. There are also conical towers with beautiful bridges connecting them. The ruins of the city are well-preserved and include a large number of fascinating archeological artifacts including bowls, metal, a small statue of a man, ancient books (including Maota's favorite book of poetry), and a clock-like device that can transport a person to another dimension. Just outside of the city is a sandy hill, where Michaelson eventually buries Maota's body. The final setting of the story is the fourth dimension where Maota and Michaelson transfer their spirits using the clock device. This dimension is characterized by utter silence and darkness. The only presence there is awareness and memory."}
{"id": "50802_2", "pid": "50802_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A City Near Centaurus by Bill Doede takes place on the planet Alpha Centaurus II sometime in the future. Mr. Michaelson comes across the ruins of an ancient city and walks through the sand-covered streets to discover more. Tall spires cast shadows across the roads, while wild plants grow out of the roofs of small buildings. Two moons shine light down on Alpha Centaurus II partially lighting up the night. Soaring towers are connected by swaying bridges, and smaller buildings clearly used to be houses. Each building has a slightly different shape whether that be spherical or square. The infrastructure is built of dark metal impervious to rust and general wear. The buildings themselves are full of various artifacts: talking books, transporting clocks, and silver bowls. "}
{"id": "50802_3", "pid": "50802_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mr. Michaelson and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28850, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Michaelson is a determined, tall, gaunt archeologist who enjoys finding artifacts and methodically undergoes the process of discovering and unearthing things, like this dead city on Alpha Centaurus II. His wife died many years ago back on Earth, and he has no children and no friends in the Earth settlement. He has a tiny cylinder in the flesh behind his ear that allows him to teleport instantly to a different location when touched.\nHe does not believe in the spiritual, and rejects that the dead city he stumbles across even needs a keeper, offending Maota greatly who refers to him as \u201cMr. Earthgod.\u201d\nMr. Michaelson is ignorant and pushy towards Maota, not heeding his warnings or respecting his appeals to leave because it is angering the gods. Instead, Mr. Michaelson can\u2019t understand why Maota won\u2019t negotiate with him, almost as if he is entitled to take possession of the secrets and artifacts of the dead city\n"}
{"id": "50802_3", "pid": "50802_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mr. Michaelson and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28850, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Michaelson is an Earthman on Alpha Centaurus II and an archeologist. At first, he seems to be a cheerful, pleasant man as he explores the ruins of the dead city because he is smiling to himself, exclaiming about his finds, marveling, and chuckling. He is, indeed, extremely interested in his findings. At the same time, however, he is stubborn, strong headed, and determined and treats Maota with condescension and even rudeness, questioning Maota\u2019s need to protect a dead city, denying Maota\u2019s belief that the spirits will return there, and dismissing his faith as superstition. Michaelson is also convinced that his views are right and that anyone else\u2019s are wrong. For example, he is impressed with the talking book until he learns that it is a book of poetry; then, he considers it a waste. He believes books about mathematics or history are much more valuable. On the other hand, he is eager to hear Maota read the book, and the sounds of the words, even though he cannot understand them, move him and remind him the lost people were human with human sentiments and passions. When Maota decides to leave but indicates he is going in a direction Michaelson doesn\u2019t know, Michaelson calls him stupid outright. Michaelson is curious to decipher the ancient peoples\u2019 language and devotes hours to doing so. He then spent weeks trying to learn more about the clock device. When he can\u2019t find anything out about it, he finally decides to push the button to experience its effects.\n\n"}
{"id": "50802_3", "pid": "50802_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mr. Michaelson and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28850, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Michaelson is an archeologist from Earth who uses a cylindrical implant placed behind his ear to travel instantly from Earth to Alpha Centaurus II. He wants to explore an old city whose inhabitants had mysteriously vanished. Michaelson's wife had died many years prior to his arrival at Alpha Centaurus II, and he has neither children nor friends in the Earth settlement where he lives. Mr. Michaelson is compelled by his curiosity and his interest in preserving historical artifacts for posterity. When he first arrives in the city, he excitedly explores the unique buildings in spite of the sand and cobwebs; he eagerly investigates the various artifacts he finds, and he makes a small pile of them that he intends to investigate further. Michaelson acknowledges the intelligence of the webfooted natives, but he still treats Maota with a great deal of dismissiveness and condescension when Maota insists on the presence of sacred spirits in the city. Michaelson is a man of science and does not have much patience for the mysticism Maota espouses. He also shrugs off Maota's persistent threats to kill him and tries to convince him to support his preservation efforts. However, Michaelson does have some sense of self-preservation, which he displays in his fight with Maota. By the end of the story, Michaelson's scientific curiosity merges with a newly-discovered spiritual awareness when he realizes he can zoom in and out of dimensions by combining the powers of the clock-like device with his own cylindrical implant."}
{"id": "50802_3", "pid": "50802_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mr. Michaelson and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28850, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mr. Michaelson is an Earthman without any close connections. His wife passed away many years back, and they never had any children together. Without anything truly tying him down, Michaelson is able to fully devote himself to his work without any distractions. As an archaeologist, he wants to discover more about ancient cultures, the way they thought, and the things they created. When he discovers the ancient city that the webfoots kept from the Earthmen, he instantly sorts through the sand and piles artifacts in the street. He plans on building a museum there where all mankind can come and see what life was like in this city half a million years ago. Mr. Michaelson is inherently curious and a little impulsive, shown time and time again when he chose to ignore Maota\u2019s warnings. \nHis cylinder, tailored to Michaelson specifically, makes him a god in the eyes of Maota since he can transport himself between places in the blink of an eye. However, just like Maota, Michaelson is able to grow old and die like any other human. \n"}
{"id": "50802_4", "pid": "50802_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is the webfoot and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28847, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The webfoot, real name Maota (also referred to as \u201cthe native\u201d by Mr. Michaelson), is the self-proclaimed keeper of the dead city on Alpha Centaurus II. He is an older man of at least sixty or seventy years, short in stature with long gray hair to his shoulders. The toes of his webbed, bare feet drag in the sand as he walks making a trail behind him.  \nMaota is sturdy in his beliefs that the dead city needs to be protected, and that the gods are being disrupted by Mr. Michaelson. He feels strongly enough about it that he resorts to physical violence on two occasions - hitting Mr. Michaelson with a book over the head, and firing a gun-like weapon at him. Although he is angry and violent with Mr. Michaelson, he also shows remarkable tolerance for him. \nMaota\u2019s ultimate duty, he believes, is to the gods. This brings him turmoil when he thinks he missed the chance the gods gave him to kill Mr. Michaelson, and even apologized to him directly for instead letting him suffer with a head wound instead of killing him. There is a reference to them perhaps having met before when Michaelson says tauntingly to Maota, \u201cYou never told us about this old dead city\u2026 Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\u201d Thus, Maota is also motivated to protect the dead city at all costs, perhaps even concealing its location. \n"}
{"id": "50802_4", "pid": "50802_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is the webfoot and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28847, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The webfoot is named Maota, and he is the guardian of the ancient dead city on Alpha Centaurus II. His people are not natives of the planet but originated from a colony from the system's fifth planet. These people are curious and sometimes highly intelligent, although they are not educated. Maota himself is an older man, perhaps sixty or seventy years old, short with long gray hair. He wears no shoes, and his toes drag in the sand as he walks. Maota is upset when he finds Michaelson trespassing in the dead city and urgently informs him that he is on sacred ground and must leave. Maota tells Michaelson that the spirits are angry that he is there and indicates the spirits might return; that is why he guards the city. When Michaelson pays no heed to the order to leave, Maota grows angry, warning Michaelson that even his steps or breath may be detrimental to the spirits and he must leave now or be killed. When his warning falls on deaf ears, Maota resorts to flattery, saying that it takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in the old street, thus implying that Michaelson is not only a god but one with the sensitivity required to detect the history and spirits of the place. \nHowever, when Michaelson tells Maota his plan to build a museum and display everything for others to come and see, Maota loses his temper and throws one of the ancient books at Michaelson, hitting him in the back of the head and knocking him unconscious. After Michaelson stays in the city overnight, Maota approaches him with a weapon, intent on killing him. Maota believes he has reasoned logically with Michaelson and given him enough warnings that he should have left; he isn\u2019t interested in negotiating with Michaelson because the only satisfactory outcome is for Michaelson to leave and never come back. He is prepared to kill Michaelson with his tube gun. Maota is willing to entertain Michaelson\u2019s last request, which is for Maota to read to him from the book. He does, but he still insists Michaelson must die. The city must be preserved for the spirits, not a show for people who may not appreciate it or the spirits. Maota\u2019s great sensitivity and reverence for the spirits lead to his great despair when the book of poetry is destroyed. When he is unsuccessful at driving Michaelson away, he chooses the last resort\u2014using the device that kills his human body but allows his mind to live on.\n"}
{"id": "50802_4", "pid": "50802_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is the webfoot and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28847, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The webfooted man's name is Maota, and he is part of a group of people who live on Alpha Centaurus II, far away from the old city where Michaelson meets him. Although they make their home on Alpha Centaurus II, the webfooted people are originally from a colony on the fifth planet in the system. Michaelson wonders why Maota is so far from his people when they first meet. Maota stays in the city because he believes strongly in the presence of spirits, and he spends his days roaming the streets feeling their presence and reading an ancient book of poetry. Maota bemoans Michaelson's presence because he believes his interest in preserving the city for posterity disturbs the spirits and would potentially violate the beauty and magic of the city. Because of Michaelson's teleportation implant, Maota believes Michaelson is a god, and so he feels he must kill Michaelson if he will not leave because mortals cannot negotiate wit\nh gods. Once Michaelson convinces Maota he is just a human, Maota feels disappointed because he had hoped Michaelson would join him in his practice of thinking the ancient thoughts. As such, Maota leads Michaelson to a room where he keeps a clock-like device that he triggers. Then, Maota appears to die. In actuality, his spirit has been transferred to another dimension. When Michaelson joins him there and demonstrates how he can zoom in between dimensions using his implant, Maota starts to believe Michaelson is a devil."}
{"id": "50802_4", "pid": "50802_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is the webfoot and what is his personality like?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28847, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Maota is a webfoot that lives on Alpha Centaurus II. He is older, around 60 or 70 years of age, and the lines on his face show it. He is a human with normal human features, aside from his webbed feet. He does not wear shoes but chooses to walk barefoot. With long, gray hair and relatively short stature, Maota is a weathered man. He takes his self-assigned role as keeper of the city very seriously and will act violently if need be. Maota is very spiritual, shown through his belief that tampering with the city will upset the spirits should they choose to return home. Although he is somewhat patient with Michaelson at first, he chooses his duty over Michaelson\u2019s curiosity. He attempts to kill him twice but to no avail, which shows his true dedication to the city. In the end, when he is trapped in the so-called fourth dimension, Maota is incredibly angry when Michaelson, an alleged god with his cylinder, is able to travel between planes while he is stuck there. "}
{"id": "50802_5", "pid": "50802_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the cylinder and why is it significant?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28842, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The cylinder is an implement tailored to Mr. Michaelson that is tucked behind his ear and will allow him to go anywhere that he desires when it is pressed. He uses it several times in the story to travel to physical places, disappearing immediately and reappearing in a new location. Once, to travel to a cold stream to wash his bleeding wounds after being hit on the head with a book by Maota, and a second time to avoid being killed by Maota firing a weapon to kill him.\nAfter Maota presses the button of the \u201cclock\u201d in the dead city and appears to drop dead. Mr. Michaelson desperately attempts to gain the knowledge to understand what the clock device does. Rather radically, he decides that he must press the button to fully understand, not completely knowing that he won\u2019t die when he does. When Mr. Michaelson sees his dead body below him in the city and communicates wordlessly with Maota in this spiritual dimension he begins to panic and search for ways to get back into his body. This is how he discovers that he can will the cylinder with his mind, and return into his physical body by doing so. Through this act he can traverse between the physical and spiritual realms, which ultimately makes him considered a god by Maota (greatly angering him).\n"}
{"id": "50802_5", "pid": "50802_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the cylinder and why is it significant?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28842, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The cylinder is a small device inserted under the flesh behind Michaelson\u2019s ear and transports him to other locations instantly, operated by his thoughts. Each cylinder is tailored to the person for whom it is intended and will not work for anyone else. It instantly sends him 500 miles across the desert to a creek where he can wash and cool off after his head injury. The cylinder saves his life twice: first in the fight with Maota when Maota points the tube gun at him. Michaelson uses the cylinder to jump out of Maota\u2019s line of sight and land behind him. The second time it saves his life is when he uses the clock device. Michaelson\u2019s lifeless body is left behind as his mind journey\u2019s to where Maota\u2019s is, a place from which there is no return. However, Michaelson remembers the cylinder and tries to use it to return to his body, and it works. The cylinder, not the clock device, actually sent him to where Maota\u2019s mind went.  \n"}
{"id": "50802_5", "pid": "50802_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the cylinder and why is it significant?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28842, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The cylinder is a small, artificial implant that Mr. Michaelson receives behind his ear. The implant allows him to travel any distance, great or small, instantaneously and is triggered by a thought. The implant enables Michaelson to travel from Earth to Alpha Centaurus II, and he uses the implant again to locate the old city that he explores on foot. After Maota injures Michaelson with the poetry book, he uses the implant to transport himself to a small creek where he washes away the caked blood from his hair.  Later, Michaelson again triggers the implant to avoid being shot by Maota when he attempts to kill him. Maota indicates he believes Michaelson is a god because of his ability to travel any distance in the blink of an eye. When Maota demonstrates the power of the clock-like device to transfer a person's spirit to another dimension, Michaelson realizes he maintains a connection to his corporeal body via the cylindrical implant. He uses this realization to his advantage by triggering the implant, which allows him to go back and forth between the fourth dimension and his corporeal form."}
{"id": "50802_5", "pid": "50802_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\n \n \n By BILL DOEDE\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 The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god\u2014but far from sacred!\n \n\n \n Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n \n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n \n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated.\n \n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him.\n \n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings.\n \n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\n \n \n\n \n The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!\"\n \n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n \n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said, chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?\"\n \n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n \n \"You must go.\"\n \n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n \n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n \n \"The spirits may return.\"\n \n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n \n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n \n \"Leave!\"\n \n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious.\n \n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt.\"\n \n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n\"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed.\"\n \n \n\n \n He turned and walked off, not looking back.\n \n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that.\n \n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools.\n \n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n \n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun.\n \n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him.\n \n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought.\n \n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n \n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n \n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n\"The spirits are angry.\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n \n \"What rooms?\"\n \n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms.\"\n \n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n \n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n \n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n \n \n\n \n \"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets.\"\n \n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs\u2014none can hold a candle to this.\"\n \n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n \n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n \n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n \n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n \n \"Maota.\"\n \n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n \n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n \n \"You will leave now.\"\n \n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n \n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n \n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n \n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n \n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.\n \n \n\n \n When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.\n \n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n \n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n \n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing.\n \n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n \n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n \n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again.\n \n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n \n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n \n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes.\n \n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years!\n \n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\n  The clock was warm.\n \n \n He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years\u2014and here was warmth!\n \n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n \n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n \n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\n \n \n\n \n When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n \n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson.\n \n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n \n \"How do you feel?\"\n \n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n \n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n \n \"For what?\"\n \n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n \n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n \n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n \n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n \n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n \n \n\n \n \"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held it up for Maota to see.\n \n \"What about the book?\"\n \n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n \n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks.\"\n \n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n \n \"Poetry.\"\n \n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n \n The old man raised the gun.\n \n \n\n \n \"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than you can fire the gun.\"\n \n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway.\"\n \n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Why not?\"\n \n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n \n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n \n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n \n \"Negotiate.\"\n \n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n \n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n \n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n \n \"Wait!\"\n \n \"Now what?\"\n \n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n \n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n \n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n \n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n \n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around.\"\n \n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n \n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong.\n \n \n\n \n Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n \n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n \n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n \n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n \n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n \n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n \n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n \n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n \n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n \n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand\u2014neither knew whose finger or hand\u2014touched the firing stud.\n \n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused.\n \n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n \n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and\u2014they could not see how deep\u2014stared at them.\n \n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book is gone!\"\n \n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\n \n \n\n \n Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care.\n \n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n \n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n \n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n \n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n \n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n \n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n \n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n \n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry.\"\n \n \" You killed it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n \n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself.\"\n \n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n \n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever.\"\n \n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?\"\n \n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them.\"\n \n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n \n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n \n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n \n \"It would not work for you.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n \n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book.\n \n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n \n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I.\"\n \n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n \n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where are you going?\"\n \n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n \n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?\"\n \n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n \n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n \n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n \n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building.\n \n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright\u2014thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n \n Maota pointed to it.\n \n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\n \n \n\n \n Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n \n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you suppose happened to this race?\"\n \n \"You tell me.\"\n \n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n \n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth dimension?\"\n \n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n \n \"And what?\"\n \n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so.\"\n \n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n \n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it.\n \n The old man was dead.\n \n \n\n \n Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll.\n \n Here he buried him.\n \n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death.\n \n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n \n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him.\n \n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button.\n \n The high-pitched whine started.\n \n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n \n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n \n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n \n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all.\"\n \n \"Neither did you.\"\n \n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n \n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force\u2014he didn't stop to define it\u2014in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n \n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back.\"\n \n Michaelson decided he try.\n \n \n\n \n \"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n \n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command.\n \n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up!\n \n \n The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n\"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n \n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n \n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n\"I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! \"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the cylinder and why is it significant?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28783, "query_start_index": 28785, "query_end_index": 28842, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The cylinder is an innovative invention shared among Earthmen. It allows the person wearing it to travel between places in the blink of an eye. Michaelson wears his cylinder above the ear, and it is specifically tailored to his being. This device becomes incredibly important in the story as Michaelson uses it several times throughout his time in the ancient ruins. The first instance of significance was when Maota attempted to kill Michaelson with his weapon, but Michaelson simply disappeared in front of his eyes, only to reappear behind him and knock him out with a well-timed blow. The cylinder saved his life then and elevated him to god-like status in Maota\u2019s eyes. \nAfter Maota travels through the mysterious clock and presumably dies, Michaelson spends several weeks deciding what to do. When he finally hits the button, his body also falls, just like Maota\u2019s, and he regains consciousness in a spirit world where he can see everything on any planet he wants. Maota tells him that no one is able to leave, no matter how hard they try, and that they are stuck in this plane of existence. Michaelson, however, is able to use his cylinder to travel out of that dimension and back onto the planet. He does it again to prove that it truly works, leaving Maota crying out in anger. \n"}
{"id": "63932_1", "pid": "63932_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Engineer Barry Barr is one of the chosen few to ride on Number Three to Venus. His beloved Dorothy Voorhees would have been riding with him, but Barry had a piece of scaffolding drop on his ankle. Unable to make the first flight, Barry hops onto Number Four instead. \nOn the journey to Venus, a small meteor crashes into their hull at several hundreds of miles an hour. The effect is immediate: Ryan is killed in the jet room and traces of the meteor are stuck in the field. Barry wakes up when the alarm bells are sounded, and rushes to join the rest of the crew to figure out what\u2019s going on. Nick Podtaguine is steering the ship with emergency controls while Captain Reno looks on. Once the jet room stabilized, Captain Reno opens the doors to find Ryan\u2019s body and ruin. After fixing all that they could, Reno hit the accelerator, only to watch in dismay at it soared out of proportions. Captain Reno cut off the power, realizing that the meteor had left metal particles in the cylinder of force. He asks for volunteers to work outside of the ship and remove all traces of the meteor. No one volunteers at first because of how dangerous a task it is; Sigma radiation affects man in ways still unknown and incurable. After Robson Hind turns the task down, Barry volunteers. He steps outside in his spacesuit equipped to block radiation and removes them with the chisel. \nOnce he returns inside, he falls asleep and wakes a day later already feeling the effects of the radiation. His symptoms only increase: dryness, heat, and breathing difficulties. He faints upon standing and realizes that the Sigma radiation had seeped into his spacesuit. \nFour heads toward Venus while Barry suffers from an insatiable thirst. Finally, upon landing, they throw open the doors to let in the muggy Venusian air, and Barry feels like he can breathe again. Two and Three welcome them, and Barry throws his arms around Dorothy before fainting. Dr. Carl Jensen gives him water which Barry inhales. He\u2019s growing gills on the sides of his neck, and dry air is becoming more intolerable. \nBarry asks Nick to build him a machine to let in moisture, allowing him to breathe better. He grows webbed fingers and toes. Dorothy doesn\u2019t visit him while in hospital until she can\u2019t bear it anymore. She bursts open the door and reveals she still loves him even though he has a wife and family back in Philadelphia. Barry reveals the falsehood and believes that Hind sent her a letter detailing this lie. One night, he wakes up to realize his moisture machine was broken and the door locked. He escapes by breaking the window and runs to the water. He dives in and inhales the water. Worms attack him, but he swims away to the ocean. He battles humanoid Venusians and kills one of them. He rescues a girl from being robbed. \n"}
{"id": "63932_1", "pid": "63932_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "People are settling Venus, and those aboard ship Four have a close call when the ship is struck by a meteorite that damages the accelerators and leaves metal in a shaft. After the accelerator is repaired under the leadership of Robson Hind, they discover the metal. Barry Barr volunteers to do the spacewalk to remove the metal that is wedged in the shaft since he is unassigned on this voyage. Assigned members are considered unexpendable, so they are expected to stay and protect the ship. The spacewalk is dangerous due to the high concentration of deadly Sigma outside. Although their spacesuits have Kendall shields, no one knows how effective they are. Animals briefly exposed to Sigma die almost right away. Barr completes the work and returns to a hero\u2019s welcome. \n\tSoon, Barr begins feeling strange. He\u2019s ravenously hungry, extremely thirsty, and having difficulty breathing. He tries to eat, but the sense that the air is extraordinarily hot and dry makes it harder for him to breathe, and he passes out. However, when the ship reaches Venus, Barr breathes in the hot, humid air, and his breathing becomes much less labored. Feeling stronger, he seeks out the woman he loves, Dorothy Voorhees, who arrived at the colony on Three. They kiss, but then he passes out again, and when he wakes, Barr asks for water which he pours into his lungs. The doctor tells him that would normally kill a person. Barr scratches his neck and notices something growing there, which the doctor identifies as the beginnings of gills.\n\tBarr asks his friend to gather materials and build him a humidifier in the infirmary. With this device, Barr can breathe better. Barr longs to see Dorothy, especially since he knows Robson Hind is probably wooing her; the two men have been competing for her affections. At last, Dorothy comes to see him, claiming she loves him and can\u2019t stay away even though he is married and has a child. Barr isn\u2019t married and suspects that Hind planted the story to win Dorothy for himself. Later that night, Barr awakens, unable to breathe. An investigation shows that his humidifier\u2019s water and power lines have been cut, and the door to his room is locked from the outside. Barr knocks out the window with a chair, runs outside, and dives into the slough. There, at last, he can breathe. He realizes that he has become a water breather, meaning he is no longer completely human. He stays in the slough until some worms start biting his eyelids, then makes his way to the ocean. He wants to stay close to the colony even though he can\u2019t breathe on land anymore, but suddenly a group of human-like creatures with webbed fingers and toes like his descend on him and begin attacking with their spears and tube weapons. He kills one but sees two other males capture a female, and Barr attacks her attackers.\n"}
{"id": "63932_1", "pid": "63932_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Barry Barr is a structural engineer serving on Number Four, a ship taking part in the Five Ship Plan headed for Venus. The Five Ship Plan had been designed to avoid filling one ship to critical mass with fuel; instead, five ships would fill their tanks as much as safely possible, land on Venus, and the ship that had sustained the least amount of damage would take on the fuel reserves of the other four for the return trip to Earth unless a successful colony could be established on Venus. Barry had originally been assigned to Number Three, but an ankle injury caused him to take the later ship. A meteorite strikes Number Four, and since Barry is unassigned and therefore expendable, he goes outside the ship to remove the debris in spite of the dangerous presence of Sigma radiation, which had been known to kill animals. As he is outside, he thinks about Dorothy Voorhees, a toxicologist on Number Three with whom Barry is in love. The wealthy jet chief Robson Hind is also in love with Dorothy, although Dorothy only has a shallow interest in what he has to offer. Barry's spacesuit offers minimal protection against the radiation, and when he returns, he discovers he has indeed developed a kind of sickness that causes him to struggle to breathe in the ship's air. When Number Four finally lands on Venus, Barry is surprised to discover he can breathe much easier in the thick, humid atmosphere there. As Number Four reconnects with the makeshift colony the previous ships have constructed, Barry is reunited with Dorothy briefly before passing out. Dr. Carl Jensen examines Barry and keeps him on bed rest for several days. When Barry awakens, he recruits his friend Nick to help him fashion a machine that will transfer the Venusian atmosphere into his room so that he may breathe easier. Dr. Jensen is shocked at the physical changes in Barry; over time, he grows gills and webbed feet. Finally, Dorothy visits him in his room and reveals her true love for him; she had been hesitant to do so because she had received a communication from his wife in Philadelphia revealing Barry was married with a child. This news surprises Barry since he is not married; Robson must have written the letter to drive a wedge between him and Dorothy. When Barry awakens the next day, he discovers his door is locked and the machine drawing Venusian air into his room has been shut off. Desperate to breathe, Barry breaks out of his room and jumps into the nearby slough, where he is attacked by hundreds of hostile worms. He swims further out into an ocean, amazed by his ability to breathe underwater. Underwater, Barry runs into two Venusians who attack him and a female Venusian. Barry helps her and saves himself by fighting off the attackers."}
{"id": "63932_1", "pid": "63932_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34263, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The spaceship Number Four is in free fall; its crew is doing everything they can to get it working again. As they tend to various systems, the outside threat is brought to the reader's attention: Sigma radiation, which is not well understood by humans but it is known to be dangerous. Barry Barr is selected to leave the ship to clear the meteorite debris for the sake of the crew. He works on cutting the meteorite debris, reflecting on the growing tension between himself and Robson Hind, the jet chief, over their mutual interest in Dorothy Voorhees, the dietician and toxicologist. Barry wakes up later feeling like he doesn't have enough air, and searches for a meal. As he tries to eat, he realizes he can't breathe, and it occurs to him that his suit's Kendall-shield, which was supposed to protect him from Sigma radiation, had leaked. Nobody knew quite what would happen to Barry after exposure to Sigma radiation. His breathing got worse over time and nobody could do anything for him without a doctor. The ship successfully lands on Venus, and Barry finds that the humid atmosphere makes it easier for him to breathe. He finds Dorothy, kissing her before Robson Hind shows up, then passes out and wakes up in a doctor's office. Barry inhales the water he was handed (literally ingesting it), surprising the doctor, who doesn't know what to do for Barry. They notice gills on Barry's neck, and Barry passes out again. Barry asks Nick Podtaguine, the mechanic, for help in building a machine. It seems Barry is now known for having saved the ship, so Nick figures he can get all the materials he needs, which only took him eight hours. The machine keeps Barry's room wet while keeping the excess water off of the floor. Barry recovers some energy now that he can breathe, and dreams of Dorothy Voorhees as he rests. He starts to develop webs on his hands and feet, and a full set of gills, but Dorothy still comes to visit him one day after having avoided Barry the entire time he'd been under the doctor's care. This helps his mood, but then he wakes up one day finding his machine turned off, and is unable to escape. Eventually he breaks a plastic window but the air doesn't have enough moisture for him, so he breaks out and jumps into the water. He faints again, inhales, and realizes his gills work just fine, which also makes him realize he is officially no longer human. He swims away from some worms who are interested in his eyelids, and eventually makes it to the ocean even though he wants to stay near the people. His lungs have not adjusted yet so he sinks again, awoken by yells of people. Barry finds a creature who looked a lot like Barry, with webbed limbs and pieces of clothing. The story ends in a skirmish with various Venusians and one other Earthman. "}
{"id": "63932_2", "pid": "63932_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat changes does Barry Barr undergo throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34291, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Barry Barr transforms from a regular human male to a creature that breathes underwater and requires moisture to survive. After being exposed to Sigma radiation while removing particles from the outer hull of Four, Barry began to feel changes in his body. Air felt dry and hot in his lungs and he quickly developed shortness of breath. Fainting spells ensued and breathing difficulties. Once they arrived on Venus, Dr. Carl Jensen gave a grave diagnosis of the unknown. Barry developed dark marks on both sides of his neck, which soon transformed into gills. Webbing grew between his fingers and toes, and his revulsion to dry air only grew. He built a moisture machine to keep in his room so he could breathe comfortably. But it still wasn\u2019t enough. On the night he was trapped inside of the dry room, he broke out and escaped to the water. Although his lungs weren\u2019t fully adjusted to breathing water, he took off like a rocket and battled several Venusian creatures with ease. Barry goes from completely human to a humanoid merman of sorts. "}
{"id": "63932_2", "pid": "63932_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat changes does Barry Barr undergo throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34291, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After volunteering for the spacewalk to remove the meteorite debris, Barr wakens from a nap unusually hungry and has trouble breathing the air on the ship. As he tries to eat, he notices a sense of heat and dryness that bothers him so much that it becomes difficult to breathe. When his meal is over, he loses consciousness just after it dawns on him that the Kendall-shield on his spacesuit had leaked. Barr suffers delirium, fever, fainting spells, and unquenchable thirst; all the while, breathing becomes increasingly difficult for him. After drawing a plan, his friend Nick builds a humidifier for Barr, which keeps his room so humid that water is dripping off the walls; this enables him to breathe more freely. When he gets a glass of water, he pours it down his throat while breathing, meaning the water goes into his lungs. The doctor doesn\u2019t know what is happening to Barr, but he tells him that if a normal person poured water in their lungs like that, they would die of a coughing spasm or congestive pneumonia. Once they land on Venus, however, Barr can breathe easily due to the humid air. Barr also has rudimentary gills growing on the sides of his neck, and webbed skins begin growing between his fingers and toes as his gills develop further. When Hinds cuts off the humidifier to Barr\u2019s room and locks him in, Barr would have died if he hadn\u2019t been able to break the window and get out. Even then, his gills have developed so much that the Venusian air doesn\u2019t completely take care of his needs. Not until he submerges himself in the water of the slough can Barr breathe freely. When he makes his way to the ocean, he encounters creatures who are nearly human but who, like Barr, have webbed fingers and toes, so it appears that Barr has become a Venusian.\n"}
{"id": "63932_2", "pid": "63932_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat changes does Barry Barr undergo throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34291, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Barry had been chosen for the Five Ships Plan because of his structural engineering expertise as well as his experience in tropical climates. His job in the Venus Colony would be to repurpose the ships that would be left behind on Venus into useful items as well as to study native Venusian materials. After stepping out into space to remove the debris from the outside of Number Four, Barry succumbs to Sigma radiation poisoning and begins to physically transform. At first, he has difficulty breathing in the air pumped through the spaceship. When Number Four lands on Venus, he is pleased to discover the thick humidity eases the choking in his throat. But the water in the atmosphere is not enough, and he continues to experience severe pains in his body as the change continues. Dr. Carl Jensen helps him through this process; he initially identifies the darkening patch on the sides of his neck as rudimentary gills. In addition, Barry develops webbed feet. Although his love for Dorothy has motivated Barry to push through adversity to arrive safely on Venus, he begins to realize that his physical developments are going to become a permanent barrier between his old reality and his new one. He can no longer breathe on land, so he desperately plunges into the water. As he swims into the ocean, his lungs fill with water and he can breathe easier. He also runs into the elusive Venusian natives, who look much like humans with bodies adapted to life underwater. This will likely become Barry's new home."}
{"id": "63932_2", "pid": "63932_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat changes does Barry Barr undergo throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34291, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Before the story begins, Barry volunteers for the Five Ship Plan with his experience in tropical conditions making him a good fit. At the Training Base, he meets Dorothy Voorhees who he falls for, but Robson Hind is also interested, so Barry doesn't trust Robson. At the start of the story, Barry wakes up with the ship in free fall and works with the rest of the crew to stabalize whatever systems they can. After he is exposed to Sigma radiation, it gets harder and harder for him to breathe over time. In the early stages, he faints a lot, and develops a fever, becomes delirious, and has an unquenchable thirst. When he is exposed to Venusian air, it becomes easier for him to breathe and his chest pains become more manageable. After he passes out again, he starts inhaling water to put it straight into his lungs, surprising his doctor, which leads to him noticing the gills developing on his neck. His hands and feet grow webs as his gills developed further, and his depression gets worse through the transformation. He wakes up one day to find his machine has been turned off, andd has to break out of the room and jump into the water to save himself, where he learns that his gills work perfectly well. He finds he is much more comfortable underwater even though he still needs more time to adapt to these changes, as his lungs are still strained very quickly which impacts his endurance."}
{"id": "63932_3", "pid": "63932_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Venus and the creatures on its surface.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34281, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Venus is a hot and muggy planet, most comparable to certain areas of South America. The air is so moist and hot that many of the colonists when arrived felt as though they were melting or wading through a swamp. Much of the planet is covered in swamps and marshes, while only a small portion is made up of solid rock or land. The air teems with buzzing insects and creatures roam the surface of the planet. Large vegetarian Venusian creatures roam solid ground, and, though they aren\u2019t going to eat the humans, their humongous size can make them a danger to have around. Different creatures reside in the swamps and oceans as well. Flesh-eating worms lie deep in the swamps, while humanoid Venusians live out in the open ocean. "}
{"id": "63932_3", "pid": "63932_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Venus and the creatures on its surface.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34281, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Venus has a climate like a tropical swamp, sweltering and extremely humid, and the air is thick with the foul odor of decaying plants. Much of the planet is covered with swamps and mud so that the colony has to set up on a rock ledge that rises out of the marsh. Days on Venus last 82 hours. Trees grow in the marshes, and there are areas of quicksand covered with green algae that look like grassy plains. Some plants are edible by humans, but there is also a plant with a poisonous thorn that killed a man. Plants grow rapidly due to the climate. The stagnant slough drains into a waveless, saltwater ocean. Approximately half of the surface is covered with water. The land areas are either rocky ledges or jungle-covered swamps. Tests indicate that there are traces of oil and radioactive minerals. \n\tMany different types of creatures live on Venus. In the marsh, there are creatures that slither and crawl, swim, and fly. Gigantic insects fly around but are harmless and avoid the humans. There are varied creatures in the swamps; the ones that look harmless tend to be the most venomous. One particularly interesting creature somewhat resembles the brontosauri of Earth and are amphibious, armored monsters. They are vegetarians and don\u2019t bother the humans except that they can be clumsy and step on or fall against a human structure damaging it. In the early days, there is no sign of intelligent life, but some of the men report having a sense of being watched. One particularly bothersome creature is a fat worm that lives in the slough; when Barr is in the slough, these worms attach themselves to his eyelids and bite them, clinging to him like leeches.\n\tIn the ocean, however, Barr encounters human-like creatures like himself, with webbed fingers and toes. They wield weapons like spears and other tubelike weapons that fire underwater, creating a trail of bubbles as they move rapidly toward the prey. These human-like beings attack Barr, and he notices they wear clothes. They bleed a red substance when they are injured and have bones that Barr feels when he strikes one with a knife. There are both male and female creatures.\n"}
{"id": "63932_3", "pid": "63932_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Venus and the creatures on its surface.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34281, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Venus is hot and extremely humid and covered with the aroma of decaying vegetation. The complete opposite of Mars' deserted, dry landscape, Venus is home to a wide variety of flora and fauna. Half of the planet is covered in water, including marshes, swamps, sloughs, and vast oceans with murky water. There are few areas of rock ledges where the crews of the Five Ship Plan build their colony. Many kinds of harmless insects fly about the swamps, but there are several poisonous plants, one of which kills a crew member from Number One. A species of massive, swamp-dwelling, amphibious, dinosaur-like creatures move about close to the makeshift colony; because of their lack of intelligence and immense, armored bodies, the creatures can be quite dangerous and actually have damaged one of the colony's buildings. When Barry first dives into the slough, he is immediately attacked by a horde of worms attempting to burrow into his skin. Later, he discovers the native Venusians, who look like humans, carry spears and tube-weapons, and move rapidly through the water with powerful bodies and webbed hands. "}
{"id": "63932_3", "pid": "63932_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe Venus and the creatures on its surface.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34281, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Venus' surface is covered in mists and creatures unfamiliar to people from Earth. Dorothy Voorhees is a toxicologist and dietitian specifically assigned to the mission to guide the humans through the flora and fauna of Venus in a way that their digestive systems wouldn't entirely object to. The fact that she was hired points to the humans knowing they would face unknowns. The plants that had been discovered before Barry arrived were edible but not interesting. What looked like a grassy plain was really quicksand covered in algae, which meant the colonists had lost many supplies while making this discovery. The wood from the trees was used to create crafts, and various types of buildings and support structures. There is one piece of solid ground (rock, specifically) that the men were able to find, though it was still surrounded by swamps. In the heavy mists of the humid swamplands are a variety of insects that were far more annoying than harmful. There are larger creatures, too, the most exciting being large swamp creatures that resembled dinosaurs, who were vegetarian but large and dumb enough to pose great danger to the humans. \n"}
{"id": "63932_4", "pid": "63932_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Robson Hind and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Robson Hind is a very wealthy man and jet chief of Number Four. The son of the manager of Hoskins Corporation, Hind was basically guaranteed a spot in the Five Ship Plan. Just like Barry Barr, he was instantly attracted to Dorothy Voorhees and her jet-black hair, high cheekbones, and intelligence. Before their ships take off, Hind conspires to join her on Number Three or transfer her to Number Four. However, his scheme eventually fails. Before Three lifts off, he sends Dorothy a letter pretending to be Barry\u2019s imaginary wife from Philadelphia, asking her to stay away from him so his wife and children can still have him. This works for a time in keeping Dorothy away from Barry. Once again, however, Hind\u2019s scheme ultimately fails once they arrive on Venus and Dorothy is near Barry again. \nWhile on Number Four, Hind refuses to exit the spaceship to work on the meteor shards, citing his assigned status. When Barry volunteers, Hind is secretly happy, almost as if he wants him out of the picture for good. \nAfter their arrival on Venus, Dorothy stays away from Barry for a time, but eventually runs into his hospital room and embraces him. She discovers that Hind\u2019s letter was a lie and rushes into Barry\u2019s arms for good. Presumably, once Hind discovered this, he dismantled Barry\u2019s life-saving moisture machine and locked him in the room to die. \n"}
{"id": "63932_4", "pid": "63932_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Robson Hind and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Robson Hind is the jet chief of Four, the fourth of the five ships sent to Venus under the Five Ship Plan. As a member of the Five Ship Plan, he has been vetted both for his jobs skills and his personality and sense of responsibility, but he is uncouth, unethical, and self-centered. He is the son of the business manager of the Hoskins Corporation which holds a large share in the Five Ship Plan. Additionally, he is competing with Barry Barr for the affections of the beautiful young woman, Dorothy Voorhees. Dorothy likes Barry, but she can\u2019t help but be impressed by the smooth-talking Hinds whose wealth enables him to entertain her in style. When Dorothy is assigned to ship Three, Hinds tries to have her reassigned to Four and then himself to Three, neither of which works. \n\tAlthough Hinds knows his job, he is questionable in his suitability for the Five Ship Plan. As Number Four descends toward Venus, a meteorite sideswipes the ship, and a few pieces break off and fuse themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing of a nozzle, causing the driver to overload, sending heat and radiation into the compartment and killing the person in there. Once they can enter the compartment, Hinds hangs back and enters last. He is responsible for changing the accelerators and afterward throws the switch confidently only to have the system almost overload again before he switches it off. Hinds determines the problem is metal in the field, which will require someone to go outside the ship and cut it out. This is a dangerous job because of the high levels of Sigma concentration that are known to kill lab animals with just a brief exposure. What isn\u2019t known is how well a spacesuit will protect a human. Everyone waits to see who will volunteer, and their eyes turn to Hinds, who quickly reminds them he is assigned and therefore not expendable. Barry Barr volunteers since he is unassigned.\n\tWhen Barr is under the doctor\u2019s care, he desperately wants to see Dorothy, and when she finally comes, she claims she can\u2019t stay away because she loves him too much, even if he has a wife and child. She received a letter just before Three blasted off. Barr isn\u2019t married, and he strongly suspects that Hinds is behind the fake letter. Hinds is also responsible for almost killing Barr by cutting the power and water to the humidifier that keeps him alive and locking the door so Barr can\u2019t escape.\n"}
{"id": "63932_4", "pid": "63932_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Robson Hind and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Robson Hind is the jet chief of Number Four as well as the electronics expert for Venus Colony. He is young, handsome, and wealthy. The sole child of the business manager of Hoskins Corporation, Hind's position with the Five Ship Plan could be attributed to the fact that his father's business held a large share of it. When the meteorite strikes Number Four, Hind immediately says he cannot go outside to fix it because he has an assignment on the ship, and he is non-expendable. He barely conceals a smile when Barry offers to take care of it instead. Like Barry, Hind is attracted to Dorothy Voorhees. However, in spite of his charms and his lavish doting, Hind fails to capture Dorothy's heart because she senses something she does not like in his personality. This shrewdness of character perception turns out to be quite accurate when Hind writes a letter to Dorothy pretending to be Barry's non-existent wife revealing herself to Dorothy and telling her that Barry also has a child in Philadelphia. This only delays Dorothy's confession of love to Barry, so Hind steps up his efforts to keep the two separated. He locks Barry in his room and disables the machine that had been supplying Venusian air for Barry to breathe. Although Hind's efforts to kill Barry fail, he does succeed in driving him away into the ocean where Barry will presumably stay."}
{"id": "63932_4", "pid": "63932_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Robson Hind and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34297, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Robson Hind is a member of the crew of Number Four, where he serves as the jet chief, and will be the electronics expert for Venus Colony. He has bold, handsome features and gives the impression of being strong without being large. Hind is the one who cuts the power lines to prevent a second blowback while they're all trying to find a solution for their freefall. He is looked to for guidance throughout the problem-solving due to his leadership position, and was the best candidate to clear the Sigma radiation but defered the role to Barry Barr to protect himself. There is tension because Barry and Robson both like Dorothy Voorhees. Dorothy is under the impression that Barry is married to someone else, and it turns out Robson Hind likely is the one who planted this misinformation in her mind through writing a false letter."}
{"id": "63932_5", "pid": "63932_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Five Ship Plan.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34261, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After discovering Mars and the moon, humanity decided to conquer yet another planet: Venus. However, Venus was too far away to safely carry the amount of fuel needed for a round trip mission. So, the Five Ship Plan evolved. Five rockets were to fly to Venus at separate intervals. Those who landed first would build a colony to live in and welcome the others to the surface of the planet. Once all five had arrived, they would figure out which ship was in the best shape and transfer all remaining fuel to that one. The colonists would head back home if Venus was completely uninhabitable, or remain on the planet for the time being, living out their lives on the colony. "}
{"id": "63932_5", "pid": "63932_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Five Ship Plan.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34261, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Five Ship Plan was devised as a way to provide travel to and from Venus and is a joint venture between the government and private groups. It is a clever solution to the problem of ships only holding enough fuel for a one-way trip to Venus. Under the plan, five ships make the journey carrying as much fuel as they possibly can and loaded with various cargo needed for survival on the planet. When all five are on Venus, the ship in the best condition will receive the remaining fuel left in the other ships to return to Earth. Barry Barr\u2019s job will then be to repurpose the materials of the other ships into whatever the colony needs, such as a landing dock and launching ramp. Members of the Five Ship Plan are chosen for their expertise in their fields and their sense of responsibility. They are expected to be so committed to the mission that they are willing to sacrifice themselves so that the mission can succeed. Much of the code of the plan is based on the ancient Earth code for the sea and requires members to perform actions \u201cfor the safety of the ship.\u201d"}
{"id": "63932_5", "pid": "63932_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Five Ship Plan.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34261, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Five Ship Plan had been designed by a joint enterprise of government and private groups to establish the Venus Colony after humans successfully visited Mars. Because the fuel requirements to make the round trip from Earth to Venus would bring a ship to critical mass, five ships would fill their tanks as much as safely possible, land on Venus, and the ship that had sustained the least amount of damage would take on the fuel reserves of the other four for the return trip to Earth unless a successful colony could be established on Venus. The crews for the five ships needed to be responsible individuals and Barry was chosen for his familiarity with tropical conditions and his abilities as a structural engineer. His job in the Venus Colony would be to repurpose the ships that would be left behind on Venus into whatever would be needed as well as to study native Venusian materials. Dorothy Voorhees was the crew's toxicologist and dietician. Other crew members included Dr. Carl Jensen, Robson Hind, Nick Podtiaguine, and Captain Reno."}
{"id": "63932_5", "pid": "63932_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\n \n\n By ERIK FENNEL\n \n On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr\u2014Earthman transmuted\u2014swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.\n \n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n \n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n \n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n \n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n \n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.\n \n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.\n \n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.\n \n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said meaningfully.\n \n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.\n \n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.\n \n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.\n \n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n \n \" There's metal in the field! \" His voice was high and unsteady.\n \n \n\n \n Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n \n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n \n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n \n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.\n \n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.\n \n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.\n \n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n \n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n \n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.\n \n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.\n \n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n \n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n \n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.\n \n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n \n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.\n \n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three\u2014in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n \n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.\n \n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.\n \n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step\u2014to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n \n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n \n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.\n \n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n \n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed\u2014most particularly a launching ramp\u2014and to study native Venusian materials.\n \n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n \n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.\n \n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n \n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n \n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n \n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n \n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n \n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.\n \n Then it was done.\n \n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.\n \n \n\n \n Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n \n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n \n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there.\"\n \n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n \n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n \n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago.\"\n \n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout.\"\n \n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.\n \n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n \n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n \n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n \n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n \n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.\n \n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n \n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.\n \n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n \n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n \n Venusian air poured in.\n \n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n \n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n \n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.\n \n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n \n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n \n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!\n \n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n \n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n \n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n \n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n \n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n \n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n \n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n \n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.\n \n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What are my chances? On the level.\"\n \n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing\u2014not a damned solitary thing\u2014I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n \n Barry lay still.\n \n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor continued, \"and you know as much\u2014more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief.\"\n \n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.\n \n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"Those things seem to be\u2014\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n \n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.\n \n \"But there must be\u2014\"\n \n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit\u2014but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n \n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n \n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n \n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n \n Nick nodded vigorously.\n \n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n \n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n \n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.\n \n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n \n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.\n \n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n \n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n \n \"Two days?\"\n \n Nick looked insulted.\n \n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.\n \n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.\n \n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n \n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n \n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.\n \n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.\n \n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.\n \n It was abnormal.\n \n But so was Barry Barr.\n \n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n \n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him\u2014her face with the exotic high cheek-bones\u2014her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair\u2014lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil\u2014her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman\u2014her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n \n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n \n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.\n \n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n \n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n \n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n \n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.\n \n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n \n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.\n \n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.\n \n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.\n \n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n \n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.\n \n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.\n \n The most important question\u2014that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians\u2014remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.\n \n \n\n \n Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.\n \n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n \n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.\n \n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in her eyes.\n \n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n \n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off\u2014oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n \n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n\"I\u2014think\u2014I\u2014know\u2014who\u2014wrote\u2014that\u2014letter!\" he declared grimly.\n \n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.\n \n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n \n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n \n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n \n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.\n \n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.\n \n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n \n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n \n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.\n \n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n \n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.\n \n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.\n \n The door was locked!\n \n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.\n \n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n \n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n \n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in\u2014but it was not enough!\n \n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.\n \n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n \n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n \n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n \n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.\n \n \n\n III\n \n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.\n \n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.\n \n Then dozens of them\u2014hundreds\u2014were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.\n \n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n \n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.\n \n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.\n \n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.\n \n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.\n \n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n \n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n \n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.\n \n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n \n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.\n \n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n \n Human\u2014or nearly so\u2014the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.\n \n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.\n \n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n \n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n \n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n \n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n \n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.\n \n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n \n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n \n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n \n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n \n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.\n \n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n \n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Five Ship Plan.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 34221, "query_start_index": 34223, "query_end_index": 34261, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Five Ship Plan was developed by various private and government groups in an attempt to blow past the existing limitations on space travel. These are dangerous expeditions manned by specialists with strong senses of responsibility who the leaders of the Plan expect to be able to maintain themselves and their crews for long enough to make it to Venus, where the leftover fuel from all five ships would be combined to one for a return journey. The specifics of the return trip would depend on who made it to Venus, what they found there, and what they could establish in the Colony."}
{"id": "50441_1", "pid": "50441_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roy Walton is the Assistant Administrator of the Bureau of Population Equalization, otherwise known as Popeek. In the six weeks that they have been working, thousands of people have been euthanized, sterilized, and relocated in order to curb population growth and overcrowding. Roy Walton arrives at his desk, filled with papers, and settles into his miserable job. He asks for a relocation of the people of central Belgium to Patagonia before his receptionist alerts him Mr. Prior is here to see him. He refuses, but Mr. Prior sneaks through security and the unlocked door\u2013Walton\u2019s fault\u2013and demands his attention. He is a famous poet, one Walton admires. He asks Walton to save his son who is to be euthanized for being tubercular. Walton turns him down, but after Prior leaves, his words swim in his head. He realizes he wants to save his baby, and so he sets off to do just that. He runs into his boss, Director FitzMaugham in the elevator and tries to lie his way through the encounter. He narrowly succeeds but is left with the feeling that Director FitzMaughan knew more than he was letting on. Walton gets off at the 20th floor and breezes past the receptionist to input Philp Porter into the computer. A series of cards come out, detailing all the baby\u2019s specifics as well as the tubercular diagnosis. He deletes the cause for euthanization and inputs the new data into the system. He comes back clear. \nHoping no one saw him, he walks down past the hall of babies and chats with the doctor, asking where his brother, another doctor, is. Evidently, his brother is running analytics, so Walton is safe for now. He speaks with the executioner, Falbrough, and tells him to double-check every baby before euthanization, due to an unfortunate incident in Europe. Falbrough agrees, and Walton quickly slips back upstairs to his office. Worrying about his actions that day, Walton gets a call from Falbrough informing him that there was a mistake, and they saved a baby\u2019s life that day. Walton tells him to keep it under wraps, and he quickly hangs up. Walton has now committed a felony, and he\u2019s wondering what the long-term effects will be. His brother, Fred, calls him and tells him that he knows what he did. By accessing confidential information (a crime in and of itself), Fred knows that Roy saved that baby\u2019s life illegally. He holds it over his head and asks for a favor in return, as well as silence on Roy\u2019s end. The story ends with Roy\u2019s fate up in the air as well as the fate of the new world order. \n"}
{"id": "50441_1", "pid": "50441_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the 23rd century, Earth is overpopulated with 7 billion people. Until Venus terraforming is up and running and travel to stars is feasible, the world\u2019s citizens have approved Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia plan to remove substandard people from society. The Bureau of Population Equalization is working to distribute the population more evenly, removing people from overpopulated areas and resettling them in sparsely populated areas. Roy Walton is the assistant administrator of the Bureau and makes decisions about moving groups of people.  While these decisions bother him, he tries to follow the director\u2019s maxim: to stay sane, he must think of the people as pawns, not human beings. In his office, facing three-foot mounds of paperwork, Roy can disassociate himself from the humans whose lives he is impacting.\n\tSuddenly, however, he is asked to meet with a Mr. Prior, whose two-week-old son is scheduled for euthanasia (Happysleep). He refuses to see Prior because these decisions are irrevocable, but Prior makes his way into Roy\u2019s office anyway, and Roy recognizes him as a famous poet whose work he admires. Prior informs Roy that his son is committed to Happysleep because he is potentially tubercular; Prior informs Roy that he was tubercular as a child but was cured. And he reminds Roy that if euthanasia had been practiced a generation ago, his poetry wouldn\u2019t exist. Roy tells Prior he cannot help him, but after Prior leaves, Roy is haunted. \n\tRoy decides to save Prior\u2019s baby, convincing himself that saving one child won\u2019t break the system, and makes his way to the euthanasia department. He takes the lift tube where he meets the director, who invites Roy to have a coffee break with him and asks if Mr. Prior met with Roy. The director says Prior tried to see him but that he referred him to Roy. When Roy turns down the coffee break and exits the lift on the euthanasia floor, he is sure the director knows what he is doing. Roy pulls the information on the baby and rewrites it, omitting the 3f2 designation: tubercular-prone. Roy also notifies the euthanasia doctor of a new policy, effective immediately, of checking the computer records for all babies before euthanasia due to a tragic error in Europe yesterday.\n\tRoy returns to his office and receives two significant phone calls. First, the euthanasia doctor for babies contacts him to let him know one baby scheduled for Happysleep that morning was indeed not due for it. The second call is from his brother, who works in the euthanasia department. When he learned that Roy had used the computer earlier and of the \u201cmistake\u201d for one of the babies, he requested a transcript of Roy\u2019s work on the computer, so he knows of Roy\u2019s crime. Roy and his brother have a hostile relationship, so Roy now has to worry about his brother revealing his crime, even though he says he won\u2019t since Roy got him the job with the Bureau.\n"}
{"id": "50441_1", "pid": "50441_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes place in the 23rd century on a heavily overcrowded Earth. The main character, Roy Walton, is the assistant administrator of the Bureau of Population Equalization. In his own office in this ugly building, at a desk piled high with more reports than he could handle, he starts to look through them and responded to one. Because the Bureau is fairly new, procedures are also still being developed. Walton's staff lets him know someone is here to see him about a Happysleep commitment (meaning someone is going to be euthanized), and Lyle Prior bursts into the office. Walton lets him stay to have a meeting but kicks his guards out: it turns out Prior is a poet who Walton recognizes. They have a hard conversation about Lyle's son, a two-week-old who is genetically susceptible to tuberculosis and is thus sentenced to be euthanized. Lyle points out that he had tuberculosis as a child, and if he had been euthanized instead of cured, his poetry would not exist. Walton has to sit alone with this, as a huge fan of Prior's work, and thinks about the thousands who had been killed or sterilized in the six weeks his office had been open so far. Walton nervously decides he has to do something even though it would be illegal, and heads out of his office, promising himself that Prior's child is the only one he would break the law for. Walton runs into Director FitzMaugham who notices he looks preoccupied; they talk about Prior and FitzMaugham reminds Walton that if they made one exception to their rules, the entire system would fall. When Walton gets off the elevator, he worries that his destination has given away his mission, but heads into the room with the euthanasia files. After looking through Philip's files, he realizes he only has half an hour to act; he re-writes Philip's file to remove the euthanasia recommendation, but still has to retrieve the baby unnoticed. The doctors are surprised to see Walton in the clinic, especially because they'd seen the Director earlier as well. Walton asks if his younger brother, another doctor, is around, so that he can try to avoid him before continuing to the execution chamber to find Philip. Walton runs into Falbrough, the executioner, and tells him to double-check all of the files in case a mistake had been made, hoping that the updated file will take care of the issue for him. Walton returns to his office and gets a call from Falbrough who wasn't sure what to do about Philip, whose record did not have a euthanasia recommendation--Walton tells him to keep it quiet and to get the child back to his parents. As he let it sink in that he had broken the law, Walton's brother calls. Fred had noticed that Roy had messed with the computer system and knows everything that happened; Roy panics after hanging up the phone."}
{"id": "50441_1", "pid": "50441_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32049, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the year 2232, the world has voted for the implementation of Equalization Laws and the establishment of the Bureau of Population Equalization, also called Popeek, in order to address the problem of overpopulation. Roy Walton is the second-in-command at Popeek, and his job is to oversee the population equalization process, which redistributes people from overcrowded cities into lower population density areas. In addition, he is responsible for the administration of the global Euthanasia Centers. These clinics carry out the controversial \"Happysleep\" procedure, which is effectively euthanasia, upon children and adults considered substandard. Having been appointed to his position by Director FitzMaugham (whom he had also worked for when FitzMaugham was a senator fighting for Equalization Laws), Roy is a reliable steward of his job, and he barricades himself in his office so he doesn't have to face those opposed to Happysleep. As Roy goes about his busy workday, including ordering a reporting on the feasibility of transferring Belgian citizens to Patagonia, the annunciator notifies him that Lyle Prior, the famous poet, is there to visit him. Lyle's son, Philip, has been scheduled for Happysleep because he had been born tubercular. As a fan of Lyle's poetry, Roy is pleased with his visit, but he does not grant Lyle's request. To do so would risk his career and subvert the work of Popeek and the Equalization Laws in general. After Lyle departs, Roy thinks about his argument that if Lyle had been euthanized for the same reason when he was a child, the world would have been denied his poetry. In spite of Roy's reservations, he decides to spare Philip, but only Philip. He takes an elevator down to the Euthanasia Clinic and is joined by Director FitzMaugham, who acts like he knows what Roy is up to. Roy proceeds to the files room at the clinic and accesses Philip's record on the computer; he removes the euthanasia recommendation from his record and proceeds to the area where Dr. Falbrough administers the fatal procedure. He informs Falbrough that a new policy requires baby's records to be checked again prior to being euthanized to avoid any errors. Upon returning to his office, Roy received a call from his brother Fred, who works as a doctor in the clinic. Fred says he knows Roy edited Philip's record, but he will keep it a secret and call it even since Roy had secured him the job in the clinic in the first place."}
{"id": "50441_2", "pid": "50441_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the new world order and the Equalization Laws.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32074, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the year 2232, the Earth\u2019s population of humans had maxed out at seven billion. This huge influx of people and steady population growth caused major poverty, starvation, and trade/supply issues. For these reasons and more, the Equalization Law was implemented in order to contain humanity and limit population growth. One such rule under this new world order was the Equalization Law where all newborn babies must be presented before they are two weeks old to be examined. If they do not have any congenital defects or carry any unwanted genes, they will be allowed to live. If not, they will be committed to euthanization, otherwise known as Happysleep. As well, several thousand members of the elderly population were euthanized, as they were already on death\u2019s doorstep. Thousands of men were sterilized in order to prevent any insufficient offspring, and those that were ill or handicapped in some way were also euthanized. \nAs for overcrowding, the Bureau of Population Equalization (Popeek) also relocates certain groups of people to more empty settings. For example, Roy Walton set up a relocation for several thousand people in Belgium to the empty areas of Patagonia. \n"}
{"id": "50441_2", "pid": "50441_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the new world order and the Equalization Laws.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32074, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Equalization Laws were proposed for legislation by Mr. FitzMaugham fifty years earlier, and when it passed, he was made director of the organization in charge of administering the laws. In the new world order and under the Equalization Laws, the Bureau of Population Equalization is tasked with redistributing the population to make the population density more balanced. It also manages the population numbers by identifying children genetically predisposed to medical conditions deemed unsuited for life and euthanizes them (euphemistically called sending them to Happysleep). The Bureau also identifies other unsuitable (\u201csubstandard\u201d) people for euthanasia, such as the very old and terminally ill. And subnormal males are sterilized to prevent them from procreating and passing on their traits. This \u201ccleaning out\u201d of the population is known as \u201cWeeding the Garden\u201d and was voted on by the population. These steps are considered necessary until more space is available for humans, either through terraforming Venus or opening the stars to mankind. Both projects are underway but not fully operational yet. \n"}
{"id": "50441_2", "pid": "50441_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the new world order and the Equalization Laws.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32074, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In this version of Earth in the 23rd century, the population is so large that people are moved from high-density areas to lower-density areas when possible, but more drastic measures are being put in place to control the population. Six weeks before the story starts, in the year 2232, the Bureau of Population Equalization is founded to coordinate a lot of these efforts. Another major effort of theirs is a project called Happysleep, which euthanizes children who are genetically susceptible to certain diseases. In order to get rid of tuberculosis, for instance, they are trying to kill off people with the \"TB-susceptible genetic traits\". The Equalization Law criminalizes saving the life of a potentially-tubercular child, which Walton knows when he leaves his office after his conversation with Lyle Prior. This same group also sterilizes men to the same effect. The main way that the Equalization Laws that govern these decisions work is that children have to go to a local clinic within two weeks of birth, and this is when these decisions are made. The other major way these Laws contribute to the story is that these are the Laws that Roy Walton is breaking when he decides to save Philip Prior's life."}
{"id": "50441_2", "pid": "50441_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the new world order and the Equalization Laws.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32074, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In order to deal with the world's overpopulation problem, Senator FitzMaugham had fought for the establishment of the Bureau of Population Equalization, or Popeek, in order to oversee the process of balancing out overcrowded areas with parts of the world with smaller populations. For example, when Belgium's population becomes too untenable, Roy requests a report on the viability of sending a number of them to live in Patagonia, where the population density remains low. In addition to the process of equalization, the more controversial measure of euthanasia in the form of \"Happysleep\" takes place at Euthanasia Centers around the world to wipe out adults and children considered \"substandard\" because of genetic diseases, physical disabilities, mental challenges, etc. The Equalization Laws also require every newborn child to be examined at a local clinic to determine if they are suitable for a birth certificate or if they will be scheduled for Happysleep. Roughly one in ten thousand is scheduled for the euthanasia procedure. Saving Philip Prior's life would be considered a criminal act under the Equalization Laws, but Roy Walton does it anyway, swayed by Lyle's argument that if he had been euthanized as a baby because of his tuberculosis, the world would never have his poetry."}
{"id": "50441_3", "pid": "50441_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32053, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Master of Life and Death by Robert Silverberg takes place on Earth many years in the future, specifically June 10, 2232, or six weeks after the equalization laws were implemented. The story takes place within the confines of the Cullen building, specifically through the twentieth and twenty-ninth floors. It starts in Roy Walton\u2019s office on the twenty-eighth floor, designed \u00e0 la 22nd Century neo-Victorian style. Roy redesigned his office, changing the lights, windows, and removing the trim, but the room still felt ugly to him. His office has a desk with a firearm strapped to the bottom, and the door features a lock so as to prevent an assassination. He communicates with people through a holographic video call, and papers and assignments are sent to his desk immediately. Throughout the story, Roy travels down the elevator to the 20th floor, otherwise known as the Euthanization Clinic. There is a receptionist there as well as several computers. Different offices house different doctors, but he makes his to the center for babies where the executioner works. The rooms are very sterile and hospital-like. Each baby had its own pen, and several doctors examined them all while parents watched from screens. "}
{"id": "50441_3", "pid": "50441_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32053, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in the 23rd century when the Earth\u2019s population has reached seven billion, and people live in extremely crowded conditions. All of the action in the story takes place in the hundred-story Cullen Building, where the Bureau of Population Equalization takes up the 20th through the 29th floors. The building was built in the 22nd century in a neo-Victorian style that is grossly overdecorated and outdated. The overdone nature of the building itself is symbolic of the foolish recklessness of the population of the last century, which led to massive global overpopulation. The structure and Bureau are outfitted with modern technology, including a pneumochute that rapidly delivers paperwork to its destination. Telephones are equipped with video capability so that callers can see each other as they talk, and a lift tube provides transport between floors. Records are stored in memory tubes, microfilm, and computers. Genetic testing is used to identify children with conditions that make them substandard and require their euthanasia. The Bureau has only been up and running for six weeks, but it has already accumulated an impressive quantity of records and data. Workers have become accustomed to their roles; one glibly reports they had identified seven children for Happysleep that morning, the \u201cbiggest haul we\u2019ve had yet.\u201d"}
{"id": "50441_3", "pid": "50441_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32053, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization are in a tall office building that is overdecorated and ugly with a lot of chrome and bright lights. Roy Walton had made some changes to his own office to make it more visually tolerable. Besides these offices, the other part of the story takes place in a records room and in the local clinic where Walton runs into a number of doctors and the executioner, Falbrough. In the clinic, there is an execution hall where the children are sent to be euthanized. Beyond just the physical aspects of the setting, this story takes place in June of the year 2232. At this time, Earth is extremely overpopulated, and the story's events take place around the policies that are being put into place in an attempt to control some of this overpopulation."}
{"id": "50441_3", "pid": "50441_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32053, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on June 10, 2232 at the offices of the newly-established Bureau of Population Equalization, commonly known as Popeek, which is located on the 20th - 29th floors of the Cullen Building. The Cullen Building has one hundred stories and is crafted in the 22nd century neo-Victorian style. Roy Walton's office is on the 28th floor directly below Director FitzMaugham's, and he has redecorated it to fit his personal taste: He has replaced the sash windows with opaquers and added electroluminescents in place of the old ceiling fixture. Roy's desk is stacked with papers, which continuously arrive through pneumochutes, and he keeps a needler gun in his drawer for protection. An annunciator alerts Roy when he has visitors. Outside Roy's office is an outer office where six secretaries work. He takes an elevator down to the 20th floor where his brother works at the Euthanasia Clinic and Files. The euthanasia file room is thirty feet by twenty feet and filled with Donnerson micro-memory tubes and microfilm records. Popeek has various local offices and euthanasia centers around the world, where people considered substandard are sent on to \"Happysleep.\""}
{"id": "50441_4", "pid": "50441_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fred Walton, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32081, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fred Walton is the brother of Roy Walton, Assistant Administrator of the Bureau of Population Equalization. Fred Walton is a physician with a vaguely unsuccessful career history: medical school, a failed private practice, and finally becoming a doctor in the euthanizing section of Bureau of Population Equalization (or Popeek) thanks to his brother. Their childhood was tense and difficult. They were orphaned at 7 and 9 respectively when their parents died in a jet crash. Fred Walton and Roy have a very contentious relationship now, shown through Roy\u2019s hindrance to visiting his brother when in his section of the building. \nFred Walton is significant because he discovered what Roy Walton had done after breaking into the office computers and looking up confidential information. He uses his knowledge of Roy\u2019s felony and leverages it over his head. Essentially, he offers an ultimatum: Fred will keep quiet, so long as Roy does too. Plus, Roy now owes Fred. \n"}
{"id": "50441_4", "pid": "50441_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fred Walton, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32081, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fred Walton is the younger brother of Roy Walton, the assistant administrator of the Bureau of Population Equalization (Popeek). The brothers are not close\u2014they have never been. Fred always told Roy he would get even with him when they were the same size, but he never caught up to Roy\u2019s height when they were younger. When they were seven and nine, their parents died in a jet crash, and the boys were placed in public care facilities. Afterward, they went in different directions, Roy to study law and Fred to study medicine. Fred had opened his private medical practice but wasn\u2019t successful, and Roy got him the job in the Happysleep section of Popeek. When Roy visits the Euthanasia Clinic, he asks if Fred is there but learns he is working on analyses, so he doesn\u2019t disturb him. Later, when Fred learns that Roy had been there, he is curious about what his brother was doing and requests a transcript of his work with the computer. Roy reminds Fred that doing so is a criminal offense, and Fred reminds him that makes the two of them criminals. Fred tells Roy he won\u2019t say anything about what Roy did and says they are even now. However, Roy now worries about what Fred will do. It is entirely possible that Fred will hold this knowledge over Roy\u2019s head in the future and use it to blackmail Roy. Fred undermines Roy's hope of getting away with what he had done.\n"}
{"id": "50441_4", "pid": "50441_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fred Walton, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32081, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fred Walton is a doctor who works for the Bureau of Population Equalization, and is the younger brother of Roy Walton, the assistant director of the bureau. He is built bigger than Roy and over half a foot shorter. The two of them lived together with their parents until Roy was nine and Fred was seven years of age, but once their parents died in a plane crash, they led separate lives--eventually, Roy had gotten Fred his job with Happysleep, which reconnected them in some way. Fred noticed that Roy had been poking around the computer system when he visited the clinic, and took a look at what Roy had been doing. Fred confronted Roy about what had happened, which made Roy realize how dangerous of a situation this was, and that it could be escalating quickly now that both of them had committed criminal offenses. "}
{"id": "50441_4", "pid": "50441_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fred Walton, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32081, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fred Walton is Roy's younger brother, and he works as a doctor in the Euthanasia Clinic at Popeek. They do not like each other very much. When Roy was nine and Fred was seven, their parents died in a plane crash off Maracaibo, and they had been sent to live in a nursery. Roy received a law education and served as FitzMaugham's private secretary back when he was a senator. Fred studied medicine and spent some time in a failed private practice until Roy got him the job at Popeek. Fred is smaller than Roy at 5'7\" and compact. Roy believes that Fred's inability to catch up with Roy's height explains at least some of the resentment he harbors against him. When Fred calls him in his office after Roy returns from editing Philip Prior's record, Roy knows he is in trouble because Fred never calls unless he has something unpleasant to say. Fred reveals he had read through the history of Roy's use of the clinic's computer and suggests he knows exactly what he did to save Philip. However, he decides not to tell FitzMaugham because Roy had secured his position at the clinic for him. He decides to call it even."}
{"id": "50441_5", "pid": "50441_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Philip Prior, and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32085, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Philip Prior is the son of Lyle Prior and Ava Leonard Prior. He was born small, a little over 5 pounds, and carries the gene for tuberculosis. Within this new society, this genetic mutation means that Philip Prior has to be euthanized and sent to Happysleep. At only two weeks old, he has been sentenced to death. His father, Lyle Prior the poet, comes to the office of Roy Walton to try and save his son\u2019s life. Although he is unsuccessful at first, his words about what his son could become stuck with Roy and caused him to save Philip\u2019s life. Philip Prior is incredibly significant because his life and sentencing caused Roy Walton to make the first crack in the framework, commit a felony by saving his life, and potentially sentence himself to a failed career and life. "}
{"id": "50441_5", "pid": "50441_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Philip Prior, and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32085, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Philip Prior is the two-week-old son of the famous poet Lyle Prior and his wife, Ava. With the Equalization Laws, all children have to be examined and tested at a clinic within two weeks of birth to determine whether they are healthy enough and genetically suited to live. If they are, they are given a certificate; if not, the certificate is denied, and the child is euthanized (sent to Happysleep) that day. Philip\u2019s test shows that he is 3f2, tubercular-prone. The child\u2019s father goes to see Mr. Fitzmaugham and then Roy Walton to plead for an exception for his son; Prior explains that he was tubercular when he was a child but that he was subsequently cured. He also reminds Roy to think about what would have happened to his poems if such a law existed when he was born and he had been sent to Happysleep. This thought haunts Roy after Prior leaves his office, and he decides to save Philip Prior, rewriting the child\u2019s medical records card and deleting his condition. The baby is minutes away from death when Roy takes the next step and visits the euthanasia doctor, telling him a fictitious story of a tragic mistake at a European center yesterday and implementing a new policy in effect immediately for checking each baby\u2019s file before operating on it. The doctor calls Roy shortly afterward and exclaims that one of the babies scheduled for Happysleep that morning was, indeed, perfectly healthy and should not be euthanized. Thus, Philip Prior\u2019s life is saved.\n\n\n"}
{"id": "50441_5", "pid": "50441_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Philip Prior, and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32085, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Philip Prioir is a two-week-old boy, the son of Lyle Prior, the poet who bursts into Roy Walton's office at the beginning of the story. The morning Lyle entered the Bureau, Philip had been committed to Happysleep. Lyle seems to think his son is in perfectly good health, but he has been labeled as potentially tubercular. This is especially shocking to Lyle because he had been tubercular when he was young, but was cured and not euthanized (because the euthanasia laws had not yet been passed). Roy Walton decides he needs to help save Philip, and goes on a secretive mission to do so. Walton changes Philip's record and then has the executioner in the clinic double-check all of the files, which prompts the executioner to think Philip is there by mistake. This lets Roy order him to send Philip back to his parents near the end of the story. "}
{"id": "50441_5", "pid": "50441_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMASTER of Life and Death\n \n\n \n by ROBERT SILVERBERG\n \n ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n \n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n \n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved\n \n For Antigone\u2014 Who Thinks We're Property\n \n Printed in U.S.A.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n THE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n \n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion. Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room\u2014unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.\n \n For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\n \n \n\n CAST OF CHARACTERS\n \n \n ROY WALTON\n \n \n He had to adopt the motto\u2014 the ends justify the means .\n \n \n FITZMAUGHAM\n \n \n His reward for devoted service was\u2014an assassin's bullet.\n \n \n FRED WALTON\n \n \n His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes\u2014but he underestimated their size.\n \n \n LEE PERCY\n \n \n His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\n \n \n PRIOR\n \n \n With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\n \n \n DR. LAMARRE\n \n \n He died for discovering the secret of immortality.\n \n \n\n Contents\n \n \n\n I\n \n \n The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n \n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office\u2014on the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's\u2014but that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n \n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and office.\n \n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n \n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n \n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly paper carefully, and read it.\n \n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in Patagonia. It was dated 4 June 2232 , six days before, and after a long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to say, Population density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\n \n \n Walton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused, picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia? Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease transition.\"\n \n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims, If you want to stay sane, think of these people as pawns in a chess game\u2014not as human beings.\n \n \n Walton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before trouble came.\n \n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff of three clever girls to make a pr\u00e9cis of each report, eliminating irrelevant data.\"\n \n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now, with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n \n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n \n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n \n The annunciator chimed.\n \n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n \n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n\"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n \n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he can have ten minutes with me at\u2014oh, say, 1300.\"\n \n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n \n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n \n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to see one of those people and try to convince him of the need\u2014\n \n The door burst open.\n \n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security. They carried drawn needlers.\n \n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n \n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this, sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in here, but he did.\"\n \n \"Ah\u2014yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n \n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can you accuse me of\u2014\"\n \n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n \n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n \n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton. Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n \n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n \n \"Are you sure you\u2014\"\n \n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world who'd take this job. Now get out !\"\n \n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit that to the guards.\n \n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said, without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a terribly busy man.\"\n \n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n \n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a man. \"I hadn't expected to find\u2014I mean that you\u2014\"\n \n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping for?\"\n \n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n \n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do something when I go home at night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite remarkable.\"\n \n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n \n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles. Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize. Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr. Prior\u2014and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is. Take Yeats, for instance\u2014\"\n \n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand, anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n \n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n \n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n \n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning\u2014potentially tubercular. The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you\u2014\"\n \n Walton rose. \" No ,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n \n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected\u2014\"\n \n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for other people. So did everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a baby every chance to live.\"\n \n \" I was tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n \n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n\"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic traits.\"\n \n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n \n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr. Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n \n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his upper left desk drawer.\n \n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n \n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three basilisks.\n \n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves ahead of time.\n \n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain, consuming precious food?\n \n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was still growing.\n \n Prior's words haunted him. I was tubercular ... where would my poems be now?\n \n \n The big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been tubercular too.\n  What good are poets? he asked himself savagely.\n \n The reply came swiftly: What good is anything, then? Keats, Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing his bookshelf\u2014his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a one-room home.\n \n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n \n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it would be a criminal act.\n \n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n \n Prior's baby.\n \n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for the next half-hour.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n \n He stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into the hallway.\n \n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n \n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child, and after that I'll keep within the law.\n \n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n \n \"Roy.\"\n \n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise. He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood there.\n \n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n \n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly, his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy. Something the matter?\"\n \n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been a lot of work lately.\"\n \n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving mankind from itself.\n \n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength, Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning, though. Mind if I join you?\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n \n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n \n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried, drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n \n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a little, I think.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n \n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n \n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed Fourteen ; there was a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed twenty , covering the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his destination.\n \n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to see you this morning?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n \n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n \n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n \n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was on his mind?\"\n \n Walton hesitated. \"He\u2014he wanted his son spared from Happysleep. Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n \n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n \n \"Of course, sir.\"\n \n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back, revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\n \n  FLOOR 20  Euthanasia Clinic and Files\n \n \n Walton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem nakedly obvious now.\n \n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\" he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n \n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n \n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\n  Some fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\n \n \n Walton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia files were kept.\n \n \n\n \n The room was large, as rooms went nowadays\u2014thirty by twenty, with deck upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n \n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n \n \"Can I help\u2014oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything I can do?\"\n \n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n \n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n \n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically backed out of his presence.\n  No doubt I must radiate charisma , he thought. Within the building he wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to himself.\n \n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip, wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n \n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n  3216847AB1\n \n  PRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at birth 5lb. 3oz.\n \n \n An elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern, codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the bottom of the card:\n \n  EXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332  EUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\n \n \n He glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n \n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save Philip Prior.\n \n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n \n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth, and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted: 3f2, tubercular-prone .\n \n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the machine. Revision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in all circuits.\n \n \n He proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol 3f2 and the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version. The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n \n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n \n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned, Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n \n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n \n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\n \n \n\n \n Five doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there, each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n \n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a certificate ... and life.\n \n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n \n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n \n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n \n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n \n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n \n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n \n \"No\u2014no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly, Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n \n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump, squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n \n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc, two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n \n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n \n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet. Seven in one morning.\"\n \n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n \n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n \n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n \n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it up for you if you like.\"\n \n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n \n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at his desk when Walton appeared.\n \n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n \n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n \n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n \n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n\"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n \n \"Sir?\"\n \n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no mistake. Got that?\"\n \n \" Mistake? But how\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets out.\" How glibly I reel this stuff off , Walton thought in amazement.\n \n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check everything from now on.\"\n \n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n \n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n \n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He remembered what FitzMaugham had said: Once we make even one exception, the whole framework crumbles.\n \n \n Well, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n \n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling you, sir.\"\n \n \"Put him on.\"\n \n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n \n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n \n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll never guess what just happened\u2014\"\n \n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n \n \"I\u2014well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this morning. And guess\u2014I mean\u2014well, one of them shouldn't have been sent to me!\"\n \n \"No!\"\n \n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is fine.\"\n \n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n \n \"No, sir.\"\n \n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet. Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us in half an hour.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n \n \"Don't say a word about this to anyone , not even the men in the examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents, apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for any future cases of this sort.\"\n \n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n \n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n \n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law\u2014the Equalization Law\u2014Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators, or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n \n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position\u2014his life, even\u2014for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n \n Well, the thing was done.\n \n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's activities.\n \n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n \n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this call. No good at all.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \n Roy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven, next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\" with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n \n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What goes?\"\n \n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n \n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't have time.\"\n \n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n \n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n \n \"Official business!\"\n \n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was curious\u2014unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of your conversation with the machine.\"\n \n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb. He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek computer outlet is confidential.\"\n \n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh, Roy?\"\n \n \"How much do you know?\"\n \n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system, would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble\u2014oh, no!\"\n \n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n \n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now, shall we?\"\n \n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n \n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n \n The screen went dead.\n \n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\n  Idiot! he thought. Fool!\n \n \n He had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew\u2014the old man could see through Walton with ease\u2014and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his father-substitute.\n \n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time, but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for Fred....\n \n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had been sent to the public cr\u00e8che.\n \n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine, unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Philip Prior, and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32007, "query_start_index": 32009, "query_end_index": 32085, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Philip was born May 31, 2232 at New York General Hospital in New York weighing 5lb. 3oz. He is the two-week-old son of Ava and her husband, Melling Prize-winning poet Lyle Prior. Lyle had voted for the creation of Popeek and understood the concept of Weeding the Garden as well as the Euthansia Plan, but he hadn't expected his son would be selected for Happysleep. Therefore, when his son is selected because of a case of tuberculosis, he visits Roy Walton's office to request an audience with him. Lyle implores Roy to spare his son's life and reminds him that had the euthanasia program been around when he was a child, then his poems never would have been written for Roy to enjoy. Although Roy is empathic to Lyle's situation, he refuses to grant his request, knowing that it would cost him his job and perhaps the entire future of Popeek. However, after Lyle leaves, Roy is tortured by Lyle's argument, and he decides to grant Lyle's request. He makes his way to the Euthanasia Clinic & Files floor and accesses Philip Prior's record. After reading the denotations on the record, Roy removes the fatal symbol as well as the euthanasia recommendation from his record. Next, he visits Dr. Falbrough, whose jobs is to administer the euthanasia procedure. He tells Falbrough there is a new procedure designed to keep public opinion positive--prior to starting each procedure, the baby's file must be checked to make sure there is no mistake. In this way, he ensures baby Philip will not be killed. Roy ultimately risks his own career to save Philip's life."}
{"id": "62039_1", "pid": "62039_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30024, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Chip Warren and his crew of Salvation Smith, a righteous missionary, and Syd Palmer, mechanic, have landed in the Belt on their spaceship Chickadee II after discovering a mountain of ekalastron, a highly sought-after material. Their new fortune is cause for celebration, so Chip picks out a flashy tie, which Syd and Salvation both make fun of him for, and sets off to get a drink. Syd and Salvation do not join him, as the repairmen were still encasing their ship with ekalastron. \nThe asteroid Danae has a gravity that\u2019s modeled after Earth, a good atmosphere, and features a wide variety of interplanetary species. Chip walks into Xu\u2019ul\u2019s Solarest and strolls past all the charm-gals, busy cabarets, and the native sing-stomp, before arriving in an empty, private bar. The Martian bartender serves him a new bottle of Scotch but is quickly frightened when a member of the Space Patrol steps in and accuses Chip of murder. The Martian runs off before the cop reveals himself to be Johnny Haldane, Chip\u2019s old friend. After catching up briefly, Chip tells Johnny about their find on Titania and explains that they turned it all over to the Space Patrol, before visiphoning Earth. At this, Johnny becomes upset and explains that their message could have been intercepted by the mythic Lorelei. Chip laughs him off, but Johnny explains that for the past two months a beautiful blonde woman has been luring spacemen to their doom and stealing all their cargo. They decide to take on the Lorelei together, especially now that the Chickadee will be plated with ekalastron, an impenetrable material. Johnny claims he knows one of Lorelei\u2019s men is on Danae right now getting more supplies, so they could follow him back to their base. As he says that, Johnny saves Chip by throwing him to the floor and sacrificing himself. He is killed by an assailant with a scar on his face. Chip tries to save his friend, but the bartender rushes back in with a horde of people, claiming Chip is the murder. Chip runs away, chasing after the true killer, but loses him. He runs back to the Chickadee, and they quickly take off, even though the plating was only halfway finished. Syd and Salvation question him, and he explains the situation, as they follow the scarred man to the Bog, an extremely dangerous asteroid-ridden area. As Chip attempts to look through the perilens, a beautiful woman pops up, crying for help: the Lorelei. Chaos ensues, and they try to get her off their transmission, while a blast rocks the hull. The Chickadee crashed, and Chip wakes up to see a large man standing above him. He and his men question Chip about the ekalastron, but Chip won\u2019t reveal its location. The story ends with the pirate threatening to torture Chip. \n"}
{"id": "62039_1", "pid": "62039_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30024, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Chip Warren, of the spaceship Chickadee II, is preparing for a solo night out on the asteroid Danae. Syd Palmer is a friend of his, and Salvation Smith is a missionary who handles a gun famously well: they warn Chip to be careful of the dangers of the Belt on his night out. Chip heads to the casino on the surface of the asteroid, passing members of many races as he heads to the small private bar in the back of the casino, empty except for a Martian bartender. As soon as he gets his scotch, someone bursts in yelling for Chip's arrest. After the bartender runs away, Chip recognizes Johnny Haldane, an old friend. They talk about Chip's recent discovery of an entire mountain's worth of No. 97, or ekalastron, a light and strong metal worth a lot of money. Instead of selling to anyone, Chip, Syd, and Salvation had sent a message to Earth about the cargo, and would handle the details later. Johnny is immediately concerned that \"the Lorelai\" may have intercepted this message--a pirate group much like the sirens who distract ships in the ocean, but in space. As Chip laughs at the idea of a mythical creature being involved, Johnny stops him to explain all of the related destruction that's happened in the past two months--only one person had escaped alive. Johnny explains that the ekalastron would be quite the prize for the Lorelai, and Chip needed to find protection. Chip reminds Johnny that his ship was being plated and could be indestructable, so they decide to go after the Lorelei together. Just then, there is an attack: Johnny is hit in the face with flame while pushing Chip out of the way. Johnny dies and the attacker flees when he hears footsteps, leaving Chip calling for help. Unfortunately, the Martian bartender thought Johnny's murder accusation had been serious, had gone to get help, and now assumes Chip is responsible for Johnny's death. A miner shoots at Chip, who runs to catch the real murderer to save himself. When he gets back to the Chickadee, he yells at Syd to get the ship moving, and spots the ship the murderer is leaving on. They move the ship as quickly as they can, and Chip catches his friends up as they fly towards the Bog, a region densely packed with asteroids. As they approach, they spot a phantom that is undeniably the Lorelei, calling for help. They try to modify their viewing equipment to get rid of the image, but she stays and keeps calling, and the ship was hit in the part that hadn't yet been plated. They are hit again and the men eventually pass out. As Chip comes to, he finds himself on the surface of a planet surrounded by pirates who laugh at him and explain that they want his ekalastron--they had intercepted Chip's message to Earth, but they still want to know where he got it.  "}
{"id": "62039_1", "pid": "62039_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30024, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Chip Warren is going to celebrate discovering a mountain of ekalastron by drinking scotch while the other crewmen, Syd Palmer and Salvation Smith, stay with the ship. Chip enters a bar where he orders his scotch when the door bursts open and a voice yells for the bartender to grab Chip, stating he is wanted for murder on four planets. Terrified, the bartender flees the bar, and Chip faces his accuser, who is actually his old friend Johnny Haldane, a Space Patrol officer playing a joke on him. They talk, and Chip explains he is plating his ship with the ek they found. When Chip says they visiphoned Earth authorities they were bringing in a cargo of ek, Haldane stops him and explains how dangerous that is, warning he might have set himself up to be a victim of the Lorelei.\n       Chip believes the Lorelei is a myth, but Haldane tells him it is real. In the last two months, a dozen spacecraft have been taken, their crews murdered, and the cargo stolen. Haldane urges Chip to go back to Jupiter or Io with a Space Patrol escort, but Chip reminds him that his ship will be invincible. Haldane then encourages Chip to join him in Chip\u2019s spacecraft to take down the Lorelei together. Haldane is looking for one of the Lorelei\u2019s men who is on the asteroid for supplies and will follow the man to the Lorelei base.\n       Suddenly, Haldane throws Chip aside as a flame shot hits the scotch. The gun fires again, burning Haldane\u2019s face and killing him. Chip fires off a shot at the assailant, making him flee, and checks on Haldane, but the man is already dead. Then the bartender bursts into the bar with a mob behind him, pointing out Chip as the murderer wanted on four planets. He accuses Chip of killing Haldane since he is standing over the man\u2019s body with his flame gun.\n       Chip runs from the bar back to his ship and tells the men to take off right away. They haven\u2019t finished plating the ship with ek, but Chip needs to catch the assailant to prove his innocence. As they travel, Chip looks through the perilens and sees a beautiful blonde woman who motions for them to come to her. Her voice comes through the ship\u2019s audio, and she implores the men to help her. No matter what frequency he uses with his perilens, all he can see is her image. They are hit with a tractor-blast. Chip is stunned his ship is damaged, but Syd reminds him they hadn\u2019t finished applying the ek. When the ship is hit again, Chip slams into the instrument panel and loses consciousness.\n       Regaining consciousness, Chip is lying on the ground, surrounded by several men. The leader tells him they have unloaded his cargo and demands that Chip tell them where they found the ek, threatening to beat the information out of him if Chip refuses.\n"}
{"id": "62039_1", "pid": "62039_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30024, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Chip Warren and his shipmates Syd Palmer and \"Salvation\" Smith dock at the Donae asteroid spaceport to refuel and allow their jerry-crew to plate the ship, the Chickadee II, with a protective layer of ekalastron--a powerfully strong, resilient metal of which the team had recently discovered a massive store which they planned to turn over to Space Patrol. As the crew work to cover the ship with the thin metal, Chip goes into the nearby town to celebrate his discovery. He finds Xu'ul's Solarest, a place where citizens from every planet in the Solar System could drink, gamble, and dance together; Chip, however, wants to be alone so he finds a quiet bar manned by a Martian bartender who gives him a bottle of Scotch. Soon, Chip's reverie is disturbed by a loud man accusing him of being a wanted murderer, which frightens the bartender into fleeing the room. Chip's accuser turns out to be his old friend Johnny Haldane, and they laugh and drink together as they catch up. Chip tells Johnny about his ekalastron discovery and about his intentions to deliver his cargo to authorities on Earth. As a Space Patrol officer himself, Johnny warns Chip that his communications with Earth may have been intercepted by the space siren Lorelei and her crew of pirates. At first, Chip shrugs off this suggestion, as he considers Lorelei to be only a myth, but Johnny reveals he is actually on Donae tracking one of her men. Remembering the protective qualities of the ekalastron coating his ship, Chip invites Johnny to join him on the Chickadee II, and they will hunt Lorelei and her crew together. After making this agreement, the two men are suddenly attacked, presumably by the man Johnny is pursuing, and he shoots and kills Johnny. Enraged, Chip flees the bar in pursuit of Johnny's killer with a horde of men tailing him, since the bartender believed Chip was the actual murderer thanks to Johnny's earlier joke. Chip runs back to the ship, and they begin their pursuit of Lorelei's man, despite the ekalastron coating being incomplete. Chip and his team realize they must catch the man in order to find evidence proving Chip's innocence in Johnny's murder. Along the way, they enter The Bog, a region of tightly packed asteroids, where Chip spots Lorelei through the ship's perilens. In an attempt to escape her broadcast, Chip exposes the Chickadee's location to the enemy ship, which quickly takes down the Chickadee II with a couple of crushing blasts. After Chip wakes up, he discovers he has been captured by Lorelei's people, who press him for information as to the whereabouts of the rest of the ekalastron. There is no sign of his shipmates."}
{"id": "62039_2", "pid": "62039_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho or what is the Lorelei?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30021, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Lorelei was first an ancient myth that plagued all spacemen. It was a Teutonic myth, similar to the sirens of ancient Greece, about a gorgeous blonde woman who combed her hair and sang to those around her. Her position on the rock lured all the men to their doom, as they would crash around her. That is where the Lorelei originated. In this turn of events, the story has evolved into a present-day pirating crew using the original myth to draw spacemen in. For the past two months, according to Space Patrolman Johnny Haldane, a pirate crew has a beautiful blonde woman calling for help to lure at least a dozen spaceships in before they kill the crew and capture all of their cargo. The pirates then turn on all of the control locks and send the empty ships back out, as they have no space for them in their current base. The Lorelei and her crew intercepted Chip\u2019s message about the ekalastron and set their sights on his ship as their next target. "}
{"id": "62039_2", "pid": "62039_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho or what is the Lorelei?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30021, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Lorelei is what Chip refers to as a myth, which his friend Johnny insists is true. According to the original stories, there was a woman who sat on a rock in the middle of a sea distracting people who went by, like the classic siren myths. Johnny had been tracking some of the related crewmen and was investigating a lead when he ran into Chip. Johnny explained the two months of destruction that had occured, including the testimony of the one survivor found in the wreckage of a ship. This myth was being tied to a lot of pirating in the area, with particularly powerful ships. This is why Johnny didn't dare try to attack the Lorelei until he learned the Chip's ship had special plating on it that could protect them. In some sense, the Lorelei is both a myth and also a symbol representing a specific cluster of pirating. "}
{"id": "62039_2", "pid": "62039_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho or what is the Lorelei?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30021, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In literature, the Lorelei is an old Teutonic myth about a beautiful woman on a rock in the middle of the sea. She sings and uses her beauty to lure sailors to her where their ships are then destroyed on the rock. In the story, the Lorelei is a trap created by a group of pirates. They manage to fill spaceships\u2019 perilenses with the image of a beautiful young woman with a \u201ccome hither\u201d look about her, motioning for the ship to approach her. Her voice is projected through the ships\u2019 audio systems, and she entreats the space sailors to come to her aid. In the past two months, a dozen ships have fallen prey to the trap; the crews were murdered, the cargo stolen, and the empty vessels set adrift back into space. On one ship, however, a cabin boy avoided detection and lived to describe the Lorelei\u2019s appearance and the attack. When the Lorelei image appears in the Chickadee\u2019s perilens, Chip changes to a different frequency, but her image is on all of them; thus, the ship is flying blindly through space. This makes the Chickadee an easy target for the pirates to hit with their tractor-blast and take over. For Chip, though, the pirates know about his discovery of ek, so in addition to taking his cargo, they want to know the location of the remaining ek and plan to beat him until he gives them the information they want."}
{"id": "62039_2", "pid": "62039_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho or what is the Lorelei?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30021, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "According to Chip, Lorelei is an old Teutonic myth about a beautiful, golden-haired damsel who sits on a rock in the middle of the sea, drawing in admirers to their ultimate doom. However, his space-cop friend Johnny informs Chip that the myth of Lorelei is very real, but instead of the middle of the sea, she makes her perch on an unknown asteroid in the middle of the Belt where she lures space-mariners to their death. Since she and her crew of pirates began attacking from the Belt, they have destroyed a dozen freighters, liners, and Patrolships, murdered their crew and stolen their cargo. Because she has no room on her hideout for ravaged ships, she locks the controls and sends them back into space as a kind of calling card. Johnny warns Chip that Lorelei and her crew will likely be waiting to ambush the Chickadee II as it passes through the Belt, and that is why they plan to join forces against her. However, one of Lorelei's men kills Johnny before they can, leading Chip to chase him down. During the chase, Lorelei appears on the Chickadee's perilens and entrances the men."}
{"id": "62039_3", "pid": "62039_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Johnny Haldane and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30061, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Johnny Haldane is a member of the Space Patrol and one of Chip\u2019s old friends. They talk briefly about their previous adventures and running into each other all across space, which speaks highly of their close bond. He arrives on Dandae to track one of the Lorelei\u2019s crew, hoping to follow him all the way back to their hideout. However, while there, he runs into Chip and makes a grand entrance, accusing him of murder. This causes the bartender to scurry away, so they sit and talk in private while nursing a bottle of scotch. After chatting for a bit, Chip reveals to Johnny that his crew found a mountain of ekalastron and they gave it back to the Space Patrol, as private users might have abused the material. All is well and good until Johnny hears that Chip used his visiphone to get in touch with Earth authorities, which Johnny immediately protests. Evidently, the Lorelei tracks people through visiphone messages and could have intercepted his. They decide to take on the Lorelei together, tracking the crew member back to their base and using Chip\u2019s newly-plated ship for protection. However, before they can move, a man comes in with a scar on his face and shoots at the two of them. Johnny saves Chip\u2019s life by pushing him out of the way but is killed by the blast. "}
{"id": "62039_3", "pid": "62039_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Johnny Haldane and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30061, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Johnny Haldane is a type of space-cop who is following a lead about the Lorelei, which has brought him to the asteroid Danae in an attempt to intercept a supply run. He is friends with Chip, though they have not seen each other in some time. However, they have a friendly rapport, as he was the one who burst into the bar at the beginning of the story, accusing Chip of murder and calling for his arrest as a way to get his attention. He explains everything he knows about the recent attacks that the Loreli has been accused of recently, and they two of them decide to pursue the case together in Chip's fancy newly-protected ship before Johnny dies in a skirmish at the bar by the hand of a man with a scar on his face. Besides the information about the Lorelei, the other lasting impact he has on his story is his false accusation of Chip when he greets him: because everyone else took this seriously, it means Chip is being chased and accused of murder for the duration of the story. \n"}
{"id": "62039_3", "pid": "62039_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Johnny Haldane and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30061, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Johnny Haldane is a member of the Space Patrol and an old friend of Chip Warren. He is a strong, brave man with a sense of humor. He startles Chip by bursting into the bar and jokingly yelling for someone to grab Chip because he\u2019s wanted for murder. Haldane is impressed to learn that Chip is plating his cruiser with ekalastron and learning of his cargo, asks if Chip will sell it on the open market. When Chip explains they turned the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus and visiphoned Earth about their cargo, Haldane informs Chip that he might be in serious danger from the Lorelei. At first, Chip thinks Haldane is talking about the myth, but Haldane explains about the Lorelei image luring ships that are then taken by pirates. The pirates take the cargo and murder everyone on board. Since it started two months ago, the sting has captured a dozen ships. Haldane urges Chip to change his plans and go to Jupiter or Io instead of Earth. But when Chip reminds him his ship is being plated with ekalastron, Haldane offers to deputize Chip to go after the Lorelei together. Haldane explains that one of the Lorelei\u2019s men is on the asteroid now picking up supplies; Haldane is trying to find him so he can follow him back to his base. Suddenly, Haldane thrusts Chip aside, and a flame shot smashes Chip\u2019s drink bottle on the bar. Another shot is fired into Haldane\u2019s face, killing him.\n\tLater, though, Chip\u2019s memories of Haldane help him. He remembers Haldane\u2019s strategy of plotting his prey\u2019s course, and when he is sure of the destination, taking care of him. Chip applies this strategy to the assailant he is chasing, rather than racing up and overtaking him. He wants to find the Lorelei and destroy it to protect everyone in space, in addition to capturing the assailant who can clear his name. It is also Haldane\u2019s warning of the Lorelei that enables Chip to respond without being drawn in by her beckoning. He knows the fate that awaits them if they approach her and immediately takes action that he hopes will prevent them from falling into the pirates\u2019 clutches.\n"}
{"id": "62039_3", "pid": "62039_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Johnny Haldane and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30061, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Johnny is a space cop with Space Patrol and an old friend of Chip Warren. He speaks with a deep voice, has a powerful handshake, and dresses in the blue uniform of Space Patrol. Johnny is in the casino when he sees Chip walking to the private bar, so he follows him there so the two can catch up. When Johnny enters the bar, he jokes that Chip is a murderer wanted on four planets, a joke the Martian bartender takes to heart after Johnny's death. When Chip and Johnny reunite, Johnny is impressed by Chip's discovery of ekalastron, and even more excited later when Chip offers to use his ek-coated ship to pursue Lorelei and her crew. Johnny comes to Donae in pursuit of one of Lorelei's men after receiving a tip about him traveling there on a supply run. After Johnny provides Chip with information about the truth of Lorelei's existence as well as her violent recent history in space, the two strike up the aforementioned plan to join forces and bring Lorelei to justice. No sooner is this plan hatched, than an unknown assailant--presumably Lorelei's crew member Johnny had been pursuing--begins shooting at the two men in the bar. Johnny sustains a blast to the face and immediately dies. Because of the joke Johnny had told earlier about Chip being a murderer, the Martian bartender believes Chip has killed Johnny. Angered and shaken, Chip pursues Johnny's killer with a horde of men close on heels who believe Chip is the actual killer."}
{"id": "62039_4", "pid": "62039_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is ekalastron or No. 97?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30023, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ekalastron is the element No. 97 on the period table. It is an incredibly valuable material due to its properties. It\u2019s an incredibly light metal, and yet it is also impenetrable. Johnny claims that it\u2019s strong enough that a simple film of ekalastron would deflect an entire meteor. Of course, because of this, any amount of ekalastron could make a person very wealthy. Chip and his crew find an entire mountain of ekalastron on the chilly Titania, a satellite off of Uranus. They decided to turn over their find to the Uranus Space Patrol, and then let the Earth authorities know that they were bringing in some cargo. "}
{"id": "62039_4", "pid": "62039_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is ekalastron or No. 97?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30023, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ekalastron is a recently discovered element that takes up No. 97 on the periodic table. It is an extremely light metal that is also very strong and resiliant, so it could be worth a lot of money to the right people. Chip and his crew had found a mountain of it, which they had collected and begun to use to plate their ship to protect it from attack. The pirates who capture Chip at the end had intercepted Chip's message to Earth about the delivery of the shipment, but it seemed what they were really after was information on the location where Chip had mined this resource. This was worth far more, which made Chip realize he still had an advantage in the discussions.\n"}
{"id": "62039_4", "pid": "62039_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is ekalastron or No. 97?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30023, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ekalastron (ek) is a recently discovered new element; on the periodic table, it is No. 97. Ek is extremely valuable due to its characteristics. It is such a lightweight metal that a man can carry enough in one hand to coat the entire hull of a battleship. Yet even the slightest layer of ek is strong enough to deflect a meteor. It is strong enough to crush the hardest materials but at the same time so resilient that it can rebound like rubber. A ship coated in ek will be invincible, so the element is highly desired by both government agencies and criminals alike. Chip\u2019s men have a cargo of it, and all three will be rich for the rest of their lives.\n\tThe element has far-reaching implications for whoever has it; in the wrong hands, it will enable criminals like space pirates to attack and plunder with impunity. In the hands of the government and the Space Patrol, ek will ensure the safety of public officers and officials, guaranteeing that criminal elements will never be able to damage their ships. It also ensures tremendous wealth for whoever owns it. The ek shows the true character of Chip, Syd, and Salvation; while they take enough for their own wants and needs, they turn over the balance to the Space Patrol of Uranus, providing that organization with the opportunity to benefit from it and preventing it from falling into the wrong hands. They also notify Earth that they are bringing a cargo of ek, presumably to arrange a private sale to the government or law enforcement, again keeping the valuable mineral out of the hands of those who would use it for unlawful gain.\n"}
{"id": "62039_4", "pid": "62039_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is ekalastron or No. 97?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30023, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ekalastron, colloquially referred to as \"ek\", is a light, but extremely durable metal discovered in vast quantities in the fiery mines of Uranus' moon Titania by Chip Warren and the crew of the Chickadee II. The metal is so strong that even a small sliver of it is sufficient to deflect a meteor striking a ship. It can easily crush diamonds into ash. For all of these reasons, ekalastron is a highly sought-after and valuable element (Number 97 on the periodic table). After discovering a mountain of ekalastron within the mines of Titania, Chip and his crew turns the reserves over to Space Patrol authorities on Uranus and begin the journey back to Earth, where they plan to deliver their ship's cargo of the element. To protect themselves on the journey, they stop at a spaceport on Donae where a jerry-crew begins covering the ship with a thin coat of ekalastron. Johnny Haldane offers to deputize Chip as a member of Space Patrol when he realizes his ship has this level of protection, so that Chip may help him in his pursuit of Lorelei and her band of pirates. Johnny warns Chip that her crew may have already intercepted his transmission to Earth revealing the cargo he is carrying, and they might be lying in wait to ambush Chip on his way back home; therefore, the two have a shared interest in working together. After Chip is captured by Lorelei's men, they demand to know where the rest of the ekalastron stores are."}
{"id": "62039_5", "pid": "62039_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Salvation Smith, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30060, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Salvation Smith is a highly-religious man and a missionary. However, his god is not a gentle one. Salvation Smith is a scarecrow of a man, tall and lean, who dresses in all black with wavy gray hair. He believed in spreading the word of Yahveh of the Old Testament and took his words to heart. Salvation did not turn away from evil, in fact, he was one of the best shooters in space. Salvation Smith stays behind with Syd Palmer at the beginning of the story, after wisely warning Chip to be careful during his night on the town. Chip and Syd both respect Salvation for his knowledge, faith, and strength, so he is usually listened to. \nIn the end, Salvation helps Chip escape from the authorities and men wrongfully pursuing him and tries to save them from destruction when they encounter the Lorelei. However, the story ends without a complete resolution for Salvation. The readers are unsure if he survived the crash, or if he\u2019d been taken hostage by the pirates. Salvation Smith is often a voice of reason, as well as a great companion throughout the story. \n"}
{"id": "62039_5", "pid": "62039_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Salvation Smith, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30060, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Salvation Smith is the father of Chip Warren. He is a tall thin man on the older side, with silver hair and a bit of a sickly look to him. His role in the story is that of a missionary; although not affiliated with any church in particular, he is determined to tell the story of his own faith and has enough motivation to do so independently, as part of an adventure. \"his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution\" His reputation was two-fold: extreme religiousness but also excellent at handling a weapon. "}
{"id": "62039_5", "pid": "62039_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Salvation Smith, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30060, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Salvation Smith is an older gentleman on the Chickadee II crew. He is a tall, rangy man, hawkeyed and gray-haired, with weathered cheeks, who wears black. He is devoutly religious although he is not affiliated with any church. He often integrates Biblical scriptures and analogies in his speech. With the heart of an explorer, Smith has given himself the mission of taking the message of the God he worships to the places they travel in space. Smith doesn\u2019t focus on the merciful, loving New Testament nature of God but rather the Old Testament nature of God as angry and vengeful. In addition, Smith is an excellent marksman and mans the gunnery turret of the Chickadee. Although he works with Chip and Syd, he is also their friend. Smith warns Chip to be careful when he goes out for a drink on Danae, and when Chip returns in a panic to leave immediately, Smith remains calm and supportive. Recognizing trouble is ahead, he immediately prepares the weapon in the gunnery turret for use. \n       Smith is also a wise advisor; when Syd says they should turn the whole matter of chasing the pirate/assailant to the Space Patrol, Smith is the one who points out that they can\u2019t port anywhere until they can clear Chip because Chip is wanted for the murder of Haldane. The circumstantial evidence against Chip is strong, and 20 witnesses saw him standing over the dead body with a weapon drawn. Furthermore, the bartender heard Haldane \u201caccuse\u201d Chip of murder. When the assailant leads them deeper into space than Chip has ever gone, he asks Smith where he thinks they are headed, and Smith predicts it\u2019s the Bog where asteroids are prevalent and difficult to avoid. \n"}
{"id": "62039_5", "pid": "62039_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE LORELEI DEATH\n \n\n by NELSON S. BOND\n \n \n Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom\u2014and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too\u2014too\u2014\n \n He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.\n \n \"There! How do you like that ?\"\n \n Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.\n \n \"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!\"\n \n \"You,\" Chip told him serenely, \"have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?\"\n \n \"Salvation\" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. \"Well, my boy,\" he admitted, \"there is some Biblical precedent for your\u2014ahem!\u2014clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors\u2014'\"\n \n \"Both of you,\" declared Chip, \"give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life\u2014and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!\n \n \"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!\"\n \n Syd chuckled.\n \n \"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!\"\n \n Salvation said soberly, \"Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all\u2014\"\n \n The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of \"turning the other cheek\" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.\n \n That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!\n \n Now Chip gave quiet answer. \"I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd\u2014sure you won't change your mind and come along?\"\n \n \"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em.\"\n \n \"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!\"\n \n And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.\n \n \n\n \n Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman\u2014all were here.\n \n Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:\n \n \n XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom\u2014Casino\u2014Dancing 100\u2014Lovely Hostesses\u2014100\n \n He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.\n \n Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native \"sing-stomp,\" and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.\n \n The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.\n \n \"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?\"\n \n This was more like it! Chip grinned.\n \n \"Scotch,\" he said. \" Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill.\"\n \n \"Of courrsse, ssirr!\" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.\n \n \"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another.\" He took a deep, appreciative sniff. \"And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here,\" he ordered. \"I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed\u2014 Hey! \"\n \n In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:\n \n \" Stop! Bartender\u2014grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!\"\n \n \n\n \n Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And\u2014\n \n \" Johnny! \" Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.\n\"Johnny Haldane\u2014you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?\"\n \n The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.\n \n \"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?\"\n \n \"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and\u2014\"\n \n \"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!\" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. \"Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!\"\n \n \"You,\" boasted Chip, \"ain't heard nothing yet!\" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.\n97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.\n\"It was touch-and-go for a while,\" he admitted, \"whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space\u2014or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible\u2014remember?\u2014and here we are!\"\n [1]\n \n Haldane was exuberant. \"A mountain of ekalastron!\" he gloated.\n\"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!\" It was no overstatement. \"Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship\u2014yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash\u2014but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?\"\n \n Warren shook his head.\n \n \"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully\u2014Syd and Salvation and I\u2014and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo\u2014\"\n \n \"Visiphoned!\" interrupted Haldane sharply. \"Did you say visiphoned?\"\n \n \"Why\u2014why, yes.\"\n \n \"From where?\"\n \n \"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?\"\n \n Haldane frowned worriedly. \"I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of\u2014the Lorelei!\"\n \n \n\n \n Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.\n\"Hey\u2014I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction.\"\n \n He grunted. \"A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story.\" He started to sing. \"' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten \u2014'\"\n \n The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.\n \n \"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.\n \n \"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt\u2014and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft\u2014freighters, liners, even one Patrolship\u2014have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen.\"\n \n \"Wait a minute!\" interrupted Chip shrewdly. \"How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?\"\n \n \"She has a habit of locking the controls,\" explained Haldane, \"and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout\u2014wherever it is\u2014for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!\"\n \n Chip said soberly, \"So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?\"\n \n \"Ekalastron!\" grunted Johnny succinctly. \"A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy\u2014\"\n \n A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see\u2014for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.\n \n \"Hold your jets, Johnny!\" drawled Chip. \"Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob\u2014and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!\"\n \n Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.\n \n \"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and\u2014\"\n \n \"It's a deal!\" declared Chip promptly. \"You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?\"\n \n \"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way\u2014 Chip! Look out! \"\n \n \n\n \n Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.\n \n Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!\n \n The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.\n \n With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.\n \n His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.\n \n Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.\n \n He felt\u2014nothing. Johnny was dead.\n \n A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.\n \n \"Hurry!\" he cried. \"This way! Follow me\u2014\"\n \n In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.\n \n \"After him! Come on! He\u2014\"\n \n And then\u2014disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.\n \n \"That's him!\" he piped sibilantly. \"That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him\u2014 and now he's murdered the Spacie !\"\n \n \n\n \n II\n \n The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.\n \n The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....\n \n But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!\n \n It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .\n \n Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, \"Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?\"\n \n \"Never mind that now!\" panted Chip. \"Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs\u2014\"\n \n Palmer said anxiously, \"Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!\"\n \n \"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes\u2014 Ahh! There he goes now!\" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. \"Hurry, Syd!\"\n \n There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the \"important business\" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.\n \n \"O.Q.,\" he snapped. \"It's your pigeon!\"\n \n And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.\n \n \"It smells,\" he ventured gently, \"like trouble.\"\n \n \"It is trouble,\" Chip told him. \"Plenty trouble!\"\n \n \"In that case\u2014\" said the old man mildly\u2014\"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action.\" He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. \"'Be ye men of peace,'\" he intoned, \"'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!\"\n \n Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.\n \n \"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!\"\n \n Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.\n \n \n\n \n Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.\n \n In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. \"A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet\u2014\" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, \"A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do\u2014\" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" offered Salvation, \"we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes.\"\n \n \"I know,\" nodded Warren grimly. \"But we won't do it\u2014yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway.\"\n \n Syd said, \"That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it.\"\n \n Salvation shook his head.\n \n \"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane\u2014but Chip!\"\n \n \"B-but\u2014\" gasped Palmer\u2014\"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!\"\n \n \"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!\"\n \n Chip said ruefully, \"That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy.\"\n \n He stirred restlessly. \"But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would.\" He turned to the old preacher.\n\"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?\"\n \n \"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled.\"\n \n \"The Bog!\" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. \"The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!\"\n \n He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then\u2014\n \n \"Syd!\" he cried. \"Salvation! Look! She\u2014she\u2014!\"\n \n He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.\n \n And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.\n \n \" The Lorelei! \"\n \n \n\n \n At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.\n \n Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: \"Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!\"\n \n Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.\n \n But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to\u2014the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:\n \n \" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help \u2014\"\n \n Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.\n \n \" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet....\"\n \n He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.\n \n It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds\u2014thousands!\u2014of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....\n \n And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:\n \n \"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old\u2014'\"\n \n Then Syd's angry cry, \"Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!\"\n \n Chip stared at his companion numbly.\n \n \"But\u2014but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us\u2014\"\n \n \" Half-plated! \" howled Syd savagely. \"And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!\"\n \n He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.\n \n He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.\n \n \"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'\" he cried, \"'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night\u2014'\"\n \n Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.\n \n For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....\n \n After that\u2014nothing!\n \n \n\n \n III\n \n From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.\n \n \"\u2014coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out\u2014\"\n \n Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a\u2014a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....\n \n Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.\n \n \"My\u2014my companions?\" he demanded weakly.\n \n The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.\n \n \"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!\"\n \n Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip\u2014but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.\n \n \"What,\" he stormed, \"is the meaning of this?\"\n \n The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he roared to his companions. \"Quite a guy, ain't he?\n'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?\" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. \"The meanin' is, my bucko,\" he answered mirthlessly, \"that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!\"\n \n \"Talk?\"\n \n \"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way.\" The burly one chuckled coarsely. \"We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us.\"\n \n Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. \"\u2014if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of\u2014\" He said slowly, \"Then you are the Lorelei's men?\"\n \n \"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron\u2014where did it come from?\"\n \n And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.\n \n \"And if I won't tell\u2014?\" he countered shrewdly.\n \n \"Why, then, sailor\u2014\" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes\u2014\"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Salvation Smith, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29982, "query_start_index": 29984, "query_end_index": 30060, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Salvation Smith is a tall, gangly missionary with a lean jaw, long, silver hair, weathered cheeks, and the heart of an adventurer. He is one of the crew members of the Chickadee. Although he is prone to quoting scripture and warning his crewmates of the violence and iniquities of the planetoids they visit, Salvation is not officially ordained through the church. However, his devout religious beliefs compel him to bring the story of his God to outland tribes. The God he worships is \"the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament,\" and Salvation sometimes resorts to strong-arm methods in bringing converts to his faith; he is quite gifted with a gun. Because of their affection for him, Chip and Syd call him \"Padre.\" When Chip returns to the ship to chase down Lorelei's goon who had killed Johnny, Salvation mans the gunnery turret and prepares for battle. When Syd wants to abandon the effort to catch the goon, Salvation stands with Chip, reminding Syd that authorities believe Chip was responsible for Johnny's death. When the goon takes advantage of the distraction employed by Lorelei, Salvation lets loose with the gunfire, shooting at an invisible target."}
{"id": "50774_1", "pid": "50774_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with the Explorer ship landing on an unknown planet. The ships inhabitants are careful of any potential diseases and so do not readily disembark to explore their new surroundings. Instead, they send a crew of four medical doctors to go on a hunt party to understand the types of pathogens on the planet. The four doctors in the hunt party are June Walton, George Barton, Hal Barton, and Max. George and Hal are brothers. Max and June are in a relationship together. \n\nThey walk through the forest, shooting different animals that they encounter to test for diseases. As they walk through the forest, they encounter a man who speaks English. His name is Patrick Mead and he introduces the party to the planet, known as Minos. The man explains how his group was 300 miles away from their ship.  \n\nPatrick and the group asks questions of each other. Patrick notes that he is shocked to see a variety of different looking people as those on Minos all look very similar to each other. The group and Pat all head back to the ship where they explain to Pat that he has to go through a process of decontamination. They begin by taking specimen from Pat and spinal fluid samples from him. Pat then continues on to the rest of the decontamination process that the others do not have to go through. \n\nWhile Pat is going through decontamination, so is the rest of the doctors \u2013 but in a different process. During June\u2019s process, she is seen admiring her body. Once they are done, they go to the dining hall to eat. A woman asks the doctors when they will be able to let out of the ship to explore the new land, and Max answers that it might happen soon. Many people are excited about the possibility because they have all been isolated in space for the past year and a half. When they enter the cafeteria, they can hear passengers excitedly gossiping about Pat\u2019s arrival. As soon as pat enters the room, people approach him eagerly awaiting to talk to him. During the meal, Pat explains how a geneticist on the planet adapted the citizens\u2019 cells to their planet so that they would not destroy the planet foraging for food. \n\nDuring the conversation over food, Hall enters the room to inform them that the hamsters showed signs of infection. This means that Pat\u2019s people still do carry the disease, the morning sickness. Pat assures them that his people would be willing to be de-infected. The crew then send Reno Ulrich to go to Pat\u2019s town to make relations with the people.\n\nAfter eating, June goes back to the laboratory. She sees Pat and the beautiful Shelia Davenport walking in her direction. She mockingly acknowledges his presence when he walks past her.  \n"}
{"id": "50774_1", "pid": "50774_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The hunt party of the 'Explorer' proceeds through a forest on planet Minos in spacesuits and communicates through earphones. The forest reminds Earth but can be dangerous, so the rest of the people stay on the ship, longing to be outside. At that time, the party of doctors is hunting animals to test for contagion, which has been the reason for massive deaths on other planets. Suddenly, an animal-like man, Patrick Mead, appears, who was sent by the Mayor from far away. The party is surprised to see an English-speaking human as there is no colony on Minos according to the map. Patrick informs them that the population of Minos is one hundred and fifty, and the planet has room for more. The variety of the group's appearances puzzles Patrick as in his opinion all people should look like June, a member of the party. She looks similar to Patrick himself - tanned, tall, with freckles and wavy red hair. He tells about a plague which happened in the past and killed everyone except the Mead families who were immune. As all the people alive are related, they look similar. The disease was called the melting sickness and it killed all the doctors before they studied it. The colony's ship went off forever to avoid the contagion and took everything with them. The party returns to the ship with Pat, considering the planet the desirable home. Pat admires the ship as he was raised on Minos without any luxuries or technologies. Max, June's boyfriend and also a doctor, tests Pat for the melting sickness before letting him into the ship. Reno's scout plane comes in surprise and is updated about the local colony. The newcomers have cureall, a multi-purpose cure from any alien intrusion to the body, but for safety the ship equipment for testings is fully mechanical. Pat's positive attitude is opposite to the usual ship talk and, therefore, pleasing for June. The passengers abroad are staring outside and stake places for their future houses. People are eager to meet Pat after a year and a half in isolation. Soon, he comes into the cafeteria and is surrounded by curious passengers. June becomes jealous of the female attention to Pat and compares him to Max, with the least significantly losing in appearance. Pat mentions that local food won't digest for the newcomers unless they are adapted by a test-tube evolution, a method used by his ancestor to avoid destroying the local flora but rather adapt the Mead's genes to local food. That leads to the inability to digest the ship's food, only the products of Minos. For some reason June feels fear. Hal comes and reports the hamsters tested before Pat was de-infected to be dead. Reno sets off to the colony to persuade the locals to be de-infected and to give their agreement through voting. The dead hamsters have nothing wrong in their bodies and the reasons are unknown. June sees Pat and admires him from afar. "}
{"id": "50774_1", "pid": "50774_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on Minos, an Earthlike planet where The Explorer has landed in hopes of colonization. The medical crew on the ship, consisting of June Walton, Max Stark, and Hal and George Barton, step outside with their spacesuits to hunt animals and test them for disease, cautious of potential plagues that could wipe out their ship. They surprisingly come across a human who speaks English, finding out that Minos had been colonized prior to their arrival. The man introduces himself as Patrick Mead. He explains that the population on Minos is small, only consisting of the Mead family, all which look alike. Pat goes on to tell the crew that a plague had struck the original colony when they arrived, called the melting sickness. The mysterious disease killed everyone except for the Mead family, and the people on Minos had tried to fly back into space for escape, but the crew never came back. The crew takes Pat back to their ship, and explains to him that in order to protect themselves against disease, tests and precautions are necessary. They run several procedures on Pat, including drawing his blood, bathing him in disinfectant, and injecting his blood into hamsters to see if he carried disease. June, having developed an interest in Pat, finds herself to be drawn to him as time passes. Dinner time eventually comes, and all the people aboard The Explorer eventually hear news of the new stranger. In the meantime, Reno flies a plane to and from the ship, carrying messages to the town on Minos. Pat arrives to the dining hall, and is immediately swarmed with interest and excitement. He tells stories of Minos and answers the many questions he is asked, and is given particular attention by the women on the ship, which June feels upset about. Len Marlow, a plant geneticist, listens as Pat tells him about food on Minos; when they had first arrived, they were unable to digest the plants and animals due to genetic differences. Their head of the clan, Alexander Mead, had managed to take human cells and adapt them to the life on Minos, ultimately allowing for them to eat and digest the food there. Pat implies that this process is necessary if the people on The Explorer want to settle on Minos. Hal Burton appears and informs the crew that three of the hamsters have died, and calls for the people on Minos to be disinfected. As June observes the hamsters, she walks past Pat, who kindly acknowledges her."}
{"id": "50774_1", "pid": "50774_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30489, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The medical party of the Explorer is going hunting along a narrow trail in the forest. June Walton asks if George Barton has gotten anything from his shot, and he says it looks like a duck. Hal Barton, his brother, says that the creatures won\u2019t look like ducks. Max tells June that he loves her and not to get eaten by a dragon. Many people wait on the Explorer spaceship to go outside, but it is up to the four medicos to hunt the animals and test them for disease. Someone fires at a specimen they see, but it turns out to be a man who has the three-day growth of red stubble. The man introduces the planet as Minos and says that the mayor sends his greetings from Alexandria. June is shocked to hear that after thirty-six light years of space travel, there is already a colony of one hundred and fifty living here. The man introduces himself as Patrick Mead, and he is shocked to see the wide variety of humans who have come from the Explorer. He mentions that there was a plague too, but it has disappeared, and there are no other illnesses. Pat goes with them back to the Explorer and admires all of the technology since he has been raised on Minos his entire life. When Pat asks to go abroad, Hal tells him that he must go through a few tests for melting sickness. Max performs various tests on him as Hal signals for Reno Unrich to drop a note in Pat\u2019s town to explain that contact has been made. Pat goes through more tests, which the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall called the Nucleocat Cureall could help ensure. June checks on Pat again and tells him that there will be a banquet after he has finished the tests. A Canadian woman named Bess St. Clair asks when the people will be let out. Max tells her that they will be going out soon because of the castaway colony. Bess is excited, and Max tells her that she can show Pat the way to the dining hall. Shortly after June and Max go into the dining hall, Pat appears and gets swarmed by a large crowd. They rescue him so that he can eat, but people come by anyway. All of the women linger longer, and June even begins to question her love for Max. Pat reveals that the people on Minos have been chemically adapted by Alexander P. Mead, who had turned human cells and made them into phagocytes. Eventually, these leucocytes are put back into humans once they have become successful. Hal then says that the colony people have the germs of melting sickness, to which Pat says that health is a top priority; the colony will need to vote on first, however. Reno is excited to study the people further, while June and George study the hamsters. As June wanders down the hall, Pat walks by, and they make contact. "}
{"id": "50774_2", "pid": "50774_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does June feel and interact with Patrick Mead?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Upon meeting Patrick, June makes note of his tall frame and how his appearance resembles her own. She seems to admire his looks. She in turn feels guilty as Max, her partner, seems to not compare well to Patrick in her own eyes. She also notes that Max is frailer than Pat. Back on the ship, June admires herself during the spacesuit decontamination process. Evident from Max\u2019s reaction, it is unusual for her to do so in such a manner. It is hinted that Pat\u2019s appearance prompted her examination. \n\nFurther, into the story, June begins to express more uneasiness with Max\u2019s figure. She also does not appear to like that so many women are giving Pat a lot of attention. She continues to feel guilty as she sees her feelings toward Pat as being disloyal to Max, who she thinks she loves. \n\nShe again shows her jealously when Pat is seen walking down a hallway with Shelia Davenport, who June herself describes as gorgeous. \n"}
{"id": "50774_2", "pid": "50774_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does June feel and interact with Patrick Mead?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "June has been isolated with the passengers of the ship for one year and a half, and Pat is the first new man she meets. He is tall and handsome, especially on the contrast with her boyfriend Max, who is of the same height as she is and not handsome. She didn't care about Max's appearance before as she loves him, but presence of Max evokes some feeling of admiration in her. She is disappointed in how Max looks on the contrast. Pat also possesses a cheerful and gay attitude, especially on the contrast with the crew, which is tired of constant searching. Pat seems an attractive movie character for June and she tries to stay afar as she feels guilty before Max. She is also jealous of all the women approaching Pat. In the end the two even flirt slightly. "}
{"id": "50774_2", "pid": "50774_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does June feel and interact with Patrick Mead?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "June is in a romantic relationship with Max. However, throughout the story, she finds herself drawn to Pat and cannot seem to explain why. Upon meeting Pat, June is stunned by his appearance, and immediately becomes aware of her looks and behavior, smiling around him. When Pat meets the rest of the people aboard The Explorer, he gains a lot of attention from the women on the ship, who are evidently flirting with him. June feels herself becoming jealous, but tries to deny her emotions and reassures herself of her love for Max. However, she still finds herself wanting to be near Pat. "}
{"id": "50774_2", "pid": "50774_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does June feel and interact with Patrick Mead?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30509, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When June first meets Patrick Mead, she is instantly friendly towards him. He smiles at June and says that many people in the colony look like them because of their similar features. Pat is very handsome, and June even feels guilty for pitying Max because he is smaller and frailer in comparison. When she goes to the shower stall later, she even remarks how she has a good figure. When Max asks if they are going to eat, she chooses to dial Pat first instead. June realizes that Pat\u2019s voice is full of vitality and enjoyment. After Pat is swarmed in the dining hall, June is very happy to have been the one who rescues him. She gets jealous when the other female specialists swarm the man. Even when she looks at Max again, he feels shrunken and shorter than before. She is angry at herself and feels guilty for doubting the love that she shares with Max, despite being immensely attracted to Pat. During her encounter with Pat in the hallway later, he touches her arm lightly, and she says, \u201cOh, pioneer!\u201d to his passing profile. "}
{"id": "50774_3", "pid": "50774_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the melting sickness?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30488, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The melting sickness is described as a type of plague by Pat. He informs the doctors that it arrived soon after the colony settled on the planet and killed all but one particular familiar which happened to be immune to the disease. The disease is described as being brutal and not even doctors were able to avoid it. According to Pat, there has not been any recurrence of the melting sickness and no other diseases to note. "}
{"id": "50774_3", "pid": "50774_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the melting sickness?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30488, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The melting sickness is the name the local colonists gave to some kind of a plague which killed all the colonists except the Meads families. It happened in a couple years after arrival and only the Meads turned out to be immune, that's why all the people on Minos look similar - they are related. The disease was so rapid and furious that it killed all the doctors and, therefore, wasn't studied. The rest of the colonists took off on the ship to escape, and left the Meads without any books or technologies, so they don't have doctors and hunt with bows. This disease is still carried by the Meads without harming them, it's also unable to record through testings - all the tests are good but the hamsters die."}
{"id": "50774_3", "pid": "50774_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the melting sickness?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30488, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The melting sickness is a plague that spread across the first colony on Minos. The melting sickness killed everyone except for the Mead family, who seemed to be immune to the disease. It is unsure what exactly the melting sickness is or its cure, because the doctors working to learn about it ended up dying during the plague. Since the, plague, there have been no more cases of the melting sickness on Minos, but the people on The Explorer still need to take precautions in case the germs prevailed. When the experiment is run on the hamsters, three of them die, one of them losing its hair. "}
{"id": "50774_3", "pid": "50774_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the melting sickness?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30488, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Melting sickness is the equivalent of a plague-type disease on Minos. Patrick does not know much about the melting sickness, but his father had explained it to him as being pretty gruesome. The doctors died too soon to find out what the disease was and what to do to cure it. It was also impossible to train more doctors or send them to civilization because their spaceship that served as a power plant with all of the necessary books went into the sky and never came back. Although Patrick says that there are no more recurrences of melting sickness, it is revealed that the colony peoples still carry the germs of the disease, which means that they must disinfect before establishing contact. The hamsters can fight off melting sickness alone, but the ones who died had strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine. George also says that they can not find any external micro-organisms. Everything present is leucosis and anemia; fever is only for the ones who fought it off. "}
{"id": "50774_4", "pid": "50774_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat criteria for health safety do the members of the Explorer follow?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30529, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Potential pathogens are of grave concern to the members of the Explorer. To ensure their safety, they send out a hunting party of medical doctors to gather data on the diseases present on the planet Minos. The doctors wear protective gear during this trip. \n\nWhen they bring Pat back to their ship, they require him to go through tests before he is allowed onto the ship. They include needing to de-microbe him and taking specimens from him. Max takes spinal fluid samples from Pat during this process. Pat then went through a long process where he was guided by mechanical voices to go through many different stages of decontamination. \n\nWhile the group of doctors do not have to go through the same process as Pat to board the ship, they go through their own decontamination process. There is a stall for spacesuit decontamination that shoots out disinfectants and baths of ultraviolet radiation for sterilization. \n\nThe ship was also governed by interplanetary health laws. These laws demanded that ship equipment protecting against diseases had to be completely mechanical in operation and efficient. \n"}
{"id": "50774_4", "pid": "50774_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat criteria for health safety do the members of the Explorer follow?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30529, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is a protocol developed to prevent any danger. The ship has been to various planets and faced plague, so they are very cautious. The doctors exit the ship in spacesuits to explore the planet, while common people have to stay inside. The animals are tested on diseases. There are many laboratories and tools on the ship, even hamsters for experiments. There is a cureall stored aboard - a cure from any alien illness. All the procedures are done mechanically to avoid contact. There are different rooms for conducting all the possible testings and experiments. No contact is allowed before the test results. "}
{"id": "50774_4", "pid": "50774_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat criteria for health safety do the members of the Explorer follow?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30529, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In order to avoid any risk of contracting disease, people on The Explorer do not interact with foreign people or environments unless they are sure that there is no present disease that can be spread. Because of this, people on The Explorer have been in isolation. When the medical crew first encounters Pat, they are wearing spacesuits outside to protect themselves from the atmosphere, and before he boards the ship, they run several tests on him and make him go through several cleansing procedures. In order to find out if Pat has any diseases, they draw his blood and inject it into hamsters, running an experiment to see if there is cause for concern."}
{"id": "50774_4", "pid": "50774_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat criteria for health safety do the members of the Explorer follow?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30529, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The criteria for safety that all members of the Explorer follow involves many tests and disinfecting. Before Pat can enter, they must first check if he carries the germs of melting sickness. Even when the doctors go on, they must stand in stalls for spacesuit decontamination. This decontamination involves being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant and being bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation. The Explorer also houses the Nucleocat Cureall, a solution of enzymes that disintegrates any non-human cell. However, as an extra precaution, there are stalls that loop similar to a rabbit maze. There is an area for soap and shower, a blood test, solutions to drink, a germicidal ultraviolet bath, sonic blast shaking, germicidal mists, and immunizing solutions. After all of this, there is also a room with high temperature and extreme dryness; more fluids are also dripped into the disinfecting person\u2019s veins during this time. These are all necessary measures to ensure absolute cleanliness and destroy any chance of anyone being a suspected carrier of infection."}
{"id": "50774_5", "pid": "50774_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30492, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with the ship, the Explorer, landing on an unknown planet. It has an Earth-like forest in the fall. The leaves were of various colors, green, copper, purple, and red. To get to this planet, known as Minos, it took 36 light-years from Earth. The ship they traveled on is described as being like a silver and black column. It was previously a yacht that was retrofitted to become the Explorer. \n\nThey take Pat back to the ship and they all decontaminate. Once they are done, they go to the dining hall for food. After eating their food in the dining, June and some of the other doctors return to the laboratory to inspect the mice. \n"}
{"id": "50774_5", "pid": "50774_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30492, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on Minos, a lovely planet reminding Earth. A party of doctors in spacesuits and earphones are moving through the forest, which looks like a beautiful Earth forest in the fall. The trail is narrow, and the spaceship, 'Explorer', towers behind. The ship is huge and it looks like a skyscraper within the forest. It is a polished silver and black column which used to be a yacht. There are many passengers abroad, staring at the planet through the windows. There are cabins, a cafeteria, a control room, a library and laboratories inside. Before coming in, Pat is tested on the ground near the ship. The ship has a cureall - a cure from any disease. Not to get sick before it's used, then testings are done by machines. There is Reno's plane which travels with the news and notions. There are hamsters in one of the laboratories. From the view plate mountains, forests, hills and fields are visible. The ship used to have ballrooms and dining rooms but all was transformed. "}
{"id": "50774_5", "pid": "50774_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30492, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Minos, a planet that Earthmen had found and landed on in hopes of finding a habitable place to colonize. Minos is visually and physically very similar to Earth, with forests, meadows, clouds, and breathable air. The animals are also similar to Earth animals. However, there is uncertainty about Minos, and risk of the planet carrying diseases that would kill the humans. Part of the story takes place aboard The Explorer, a large yacht-converted-spaceship. The Explorer is silver and black and towers over the forests of Minos, and inside the ship has several compartments, including precautionary medical rooms, staterooms, and a dining hall."}
{"id": "50774_5", "pid": "50774_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCONTAGION\n \n \n By KATHERINE MacLEAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\n \n \n \n It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.\n \n The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.\n \n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.\n \n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.\n \n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked like a duck.\"\n \n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said soberly.\n \n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\n \n \n\n \n They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n \n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.\n \n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n \n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.\n \n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n \n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n \n They lowered their guns.\n \n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n \n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n \n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n \n \"English?\" gasped June.\n \n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\n \n \n\n \n June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years\u2014thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel\u2014to be told that the planet was already settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not on the map.\"\n \n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n \n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n \n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n\"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.\"\n \n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.\n \n \"What\u2014what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n \n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. \"That is\u2014you are people, aren't you?\" he asked startlingly.\n \n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n \n \"Well, you are all so\u2014so\u2014\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n \n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n \n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these\u2014interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth\u2014\" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.\n \n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n \n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n \n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n \n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n \n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.\n \n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and me?\"\n \n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n\"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable.\"\n \n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n \n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n \n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look.\"\n  Plague. \"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n \n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it.\"\n \n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n \n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.\n \n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Any other diseases?\"\n \n \"Not a one.\"\n \n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\n \n \n\n \n Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n \n The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n \n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n \n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough.\"\n \n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n \n \n\n \n \"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n \n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n \n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n \n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.\n \n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n \n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm.\"\n \n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.\n \n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:\n \n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n \n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.\n \n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.\n \n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs\u2014if that's what caused it\u2014to wipe out a planet.\"\n \n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n \n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n \n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on board.\"\n \n \"More needles?\"\n \n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n \n \"Rough?\"\n \n \"It isn't easy.\"\n \n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n \n In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n \n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n \n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n \n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n \n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\n \n \n\n \n June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n \n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n \n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?\"\n \n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n \n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?\"\n \n \"Are you hungry?\"\n \n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n \n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n \n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n \n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n \n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n \n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n \n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.\n \n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time\u2014Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\n \n \n\n \n Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.\n \n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n \n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.\n \n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be out in twenty minutes.\"\n \n \"May I go see him?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n \n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.\n \n \n\n \n They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n \n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.\n \n \"\u2014new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n \n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n \n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n \n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n \n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh\u2014there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n \n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.\n \n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you really swim across a river to come here?\"\n \n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n \n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n \n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n \n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.\n \n \n\n \n Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n \n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.\n \n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n \n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.\n \n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n \n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.\n \n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n \n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.\n \n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.\n \n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n \n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or\u2014was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.\n \n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n \n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n\"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n \n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n \n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n \n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n \n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n \n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people had no doctors.\"\n \n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'\"\n \n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n \n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n \n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution\u2014a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n \n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from.\"\n \n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n \n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty.\"\n \n \"A character,\" Max said.\n \n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n \n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n \n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n \n \"Uh- uh !\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control\u2014right up your alley.\"\n \n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste.\"\n \n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n \n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.\n \n \n\n \n Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\" They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n \n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.\n \n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n \n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n \n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.\n \n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book\u2014Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n \n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n \n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.\n \n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30447, "query_start_index": 30449, "query_end_index": 30492, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on the planet of Minos. The forest that the doctors trek through is said to be similar to Earth in the fall, but it is not fall. The colors of the leaves themselves are green, copper, purple, and fiery red. There are also patches of bright greenish sunlight and wind. On the planet, the small town of Alexandria is also there. The Explorer itself is converted from a yacht with a synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals. However, it does not have the newest speed drives. Inside of the ship, there are multiple stalls and rooms for disinfecting. There is also a locker room with shower stalls and a wall mirror. The room has a wall phone too. The Explorer has a viewplate, showcasing the outside landscape of mountains on the horizon. The low rolling hills are bronze and red, with patches of clear green in the fields. The cafeteria is converted from an old dining room, so it still has the original finely grained wood of the ceilings and walls. It also features sound absorbance, soft music spools, and intimate small light tables to eat at. There are trays to use to take food back to a table too. The ship has many working and living quarters as well, including a laboratory to do experiments in and study the hamsters. "}
{"id": "63874_1", "pid": "63874_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25903, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins with Sim being born in a cold cave. He\u2019s wailing with tears while his mom feverishly feeds him. Even though he is a newborn, he interestingly has some self-awareness. Sim looked around the cave and spotted some old people dying in a graphic, grotesque manner. He raged in angst and his mom moved to soothe him. \n\nSuddenly, his father goes to attack him and his mother with a knife. His father wants to kill him as he reasons that there is no reason to live. Sim\u2019s mother begs him not to and tells him to have faith that their son might live longer. After this altercation, Sim notices his sister, Dark, for the first time. Afterwards, he notices that his mother goes through a painful process of aging. Sim cannot seem to find anywhere to look in the cave that is not horrifying to look at and cries himself at these revelations. \n\nBecause the people on this planet age incredibly fast, Sim goes through a lot of understanding and self-thought during the first day of his life. Eventually, the next day arrives. As an avalanche falls into the valley, Sim\u2019s father takes him and they both jump into the avalanche and are carried by it into the valley. Sim and his family enjoy the valley during the time that it is livable to play within its borders. During this time, Sim\u2019s mother and father become upset as there is a pressing realization that they both will die soon. They all hurriedly return back to their cave as the sun is coming out and would kill them if they are caught in its rays. A young child is caught in the sun\u2019s rays and burned to death. \n\nUpon their return, Sim\u2019s mother and father toast icicles to signify their last day. Throughout the day, Sim continues to grow and gain more intelligence. His mother feeds him and lovingly embraces him. Upon their mother\u2019s instruction, Dark takes Sim out into the valley and watches over him. While they are in the valley, the two parents die from old age. In the valley, Sim wonders why no one else asks about the metal seed in the distance that he sees. He thinks it is a potential escape plan. \n\nWhile outside, Sim observes meaning screaming a war rallying cry. When he finds a red berry, a boy named Chion goes and steals it from Sim. Dark slaps the boy and scolds him for stealing the berry. Sim thinks to himself about how he does not understand the fighting nature people have when life is already so short. He then threatens Chion and acknowledges the boy as his new enemy. Dark gives him advice about enemies and friends, how quick they can be made. However, Sim gets distracted with lustful thoughts about a girl that passes him. Dark mentions that she is concerned for his future as he will have to fight Chion. They then both run back to the caves. \n"}
{"id": "63874_1", "pid": "63874_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25903, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sim is just born in a cave, which is a nightmare. His mother feeds him and he grows larger and larger. There is a scary man in the farther corner of the cave, Sim's father with eyes being the only alive things on his face. Behind, the old people are sitting in the tunnel and dying. The father heads towards Sim with a knife to kill the child as there is nothing for him to live for. The mother disagrees and takes the weapon away. Sim's sister, Dark, is eating in the same room. The mother is also aging and dying. Sim understands everything though he is just one hour old and he is terrified. On the planet the days are flame, and the nights are ice, with dawn and sunset being the only bearable time to go outside. For that reason people live on the cliffs and they are about to die. Sim is about to live only eight days and all without sleep. Every age passes by really fast and people get old in days on the horrible planet. Ten thousand days ago metal seeds crashed on this planet bringing the people here, who rushed to hide in the cliffs and grew old in days. The only usable ship after the crash is still beyond the valley of cliffs, with some scientists working in it. Sim is determined to go there when he grows old and wise enough. At dawn, Sim's father takes him outside, leaps out during an avalanche and makes it alive. Fruits appear and as Sim eats, he rapidly gets knowledge. The mother cries for the transiency of time and wants to take the last look at everything, as they will die soon. The sun is rising but she is not afraid to be caught by it. Everyone rushes to the hideouts, including the family, but someone's child doesn't make it and is burnt. Sim glimpses the metal ship, his dream. Sim's parents are too feeble and send Dark to play with Sim at sunset, while they die. At dawn a funeral procession takes place for all dead during the night. Sim already can walk along. Dark and Sim discuss what they know when some people run to fight others. The kids are surprised as life is too short to fight. A boy, Chion, fights Sim for a berry. Sim understands what enemies and friends are, and the boy promises to kill him the next day. Dark explains how those are made and says that people around believe they can earn another day of life by killing the other. Suddenly, Sim notices and touches a girl, who he knows will become his wife tomorrow and they will be buried together. The girl introduces herself as Lyte, and along with Sim, Chion promises to remember the name. Dark tells Sim he needs weapons to fight for Lyte."}
{"id": "63874_1", "pid": "63874_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25903, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story opens with Sim being born in a cave. He immediately  is aware of feelings and sensations and is introduced to the dreadful world his family lives in. Sim is fed fruits and grass by his mother as he grows larger, and he sees the others in the cave begin to die. As Sim's mother holds him, his father suddenly takes him and holds a knife to him, planning to kill him. Sim's mother pleads as his father wonders what he has to live for. Sim sees his sister, Dark, beside him, and his mother manages to grab the knife from his father. Sim soon begins to understand, through racial memory, the conditions he lives in. He understands that the planet he is on, on which the people before him had crashed, casts deadly radiation on the planet which causes the people on it to live for only eight days. The land outside the cave is too dangerous and deadly during the days and nights; only when it is dawn or sunset do the valleys bloom with nature and the people can enjoy its short life. Sim begins to age rapidly, aware of the eight days he has to live, and desperate to find a solution. He has a vision of a spaceship on a far out mountain, intact but impossible to get to, where a group of scientists struggle to find a way home. Sim longs to get to the ship and prolong his life. As dawn approaches, the people in the cave get ready to head down to the valley, where the daily Avalanche occurs; Sim's father recklessly takes him through the avalanche, barely surviving. Sim watches the valley become flooded with life as he gains more knowledge and understanding. As dawn fades, Sim's parents acknowledge that it is their last day of living, and everyone bolts back into the cave, a child being left behind and scorched by the sun. Sim's parents make a toast on their last day of life, and he watches them age until they are unable to walk and struggle to speak, while Sim himself notices his growth and ability. At sunset, Sim's parents are no longer able to go outside, and Sim says his first word, \"Why\". The next day, Sim's parents pass, and Dark becomes his caretaker. They frolic in the valley after the funeral procession, where Sim sees a group of men engage in war and is perplexed. He is then knocked to the ground by a child named Chion, making his first enemy. Dark explains that enemies are inevitable, especially due to the superstition some believe about gaining more days of life by killing others. Sim then notices a girl named Lyte, who he takes a liking to and acknowledges as his future wife."}
{"id": "63874_1", "pid": "63874_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25903, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sim is born during the night. His mother feeds him with feverish hands as he realizes that he has begun the nightmare of living. As the thick fog clears, he sees a man with a dying face begin to approach them. His mother is fearful, but she continues to feed him things such as ice-nipples, pebble-fruits, and valley-grass. As his father approaches, people sitting in the tunnel all die. His father raises the knife over him and plans to kill him, but his mother flings herself upon the back of his father. He wants to kill Sim\u2019s sister too, but seeing his wife\u2019s state makes him change his mind. Sim begins to understand that he is on a planet next to the sun, with cold nights and hot days. Most of the people bring their children out during dawn and sunset to play because these are the only times the climate is bearable. Sim knows that he has exactly eight days to live. Sim feels that it is unfair that he only has eight days to live before he dies and wonders how the people have gotten into this situation. He gets flashbacks of a crash that brought men and women to the planet; their bodies are altered so that they live and die in a week. He tries to think about what he can do to save them and suddenly gets another image of a deserted spaceship on a low mountain. His father wakes him up to announce that it is dawn, and the Avalanche comes. As people push towards the dawn, the rocks fall too. His father lifts him up, and they narrowly avoid being killed by one. Dark runs ahead, and Sim wonders why there is laughing. Suddenly, he sees plants come to life and fruit begin to sprout, giving him new knowledge. His parents discuss how this is the last time they will see these sights again; the sun begins to rise again, and they all leave. Sim watches a young child running in the flatness, but the child dies before he makes it. His parents toast one last time, and Sim watches them age rapidly from one stage to another. Before dying, his mother tells Dark to take care of him. Sim speaks for the first time as his parents die. On the second day, there is a funeral procession for the people who have died the previous night. Dark and Sim go outside to see fifty young men go to war, which makes him bewildered as to why people fight when their lives are already so short. A small boy attacks him, and he introduces himself as Chion. Sim realizes that this is his enemy as Chion says that he will be big enough to kill him tomorrow. He sees his future wife named Lyte, and it seems that Chion is interested as well. Dark tells him to eat so he will be strong enough to fight. "}
{"id": "63874_2", "pid": "63874_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins at night when Sim is born. He and his family are inside of the cold cave. The cave had a thick fog in it that originally obscured his dad from view. The cave is where people on the planet spend most of their time. During the two hours of the day that they are able to venture out into the valley, they enjoy the beautiful scenery of greenery until they have to return to their cave tunnels. When the time is up, the sun returns and its rays scorch and kill everything in the valley. "}
{"id": "63874_2", "pid": "63874_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins in a dark cave with a family within. The parents look old, the father threatens his newborn son with a knife, and the only thing the little boy and his sister do is eating. In the tunnel behind old people are dying. The planet is dangerous, it's extremely hot and the sun burns everything during the day, and the nights are cold with ice. Only at dawn and sunset the temperatures are normal and people can go outside. At these times the planet is beautiful and fruitful. When the sun appears or disappears the people hurry to the caves in the cliffs, otherwise, they die in a second outside. The temperature inside the caves is normal. There are metal pieces of seeds far away, most of the ships are broken, but one is known to be still functioning, though it's far away. "}
{"id": "63874_2", "pid": "63874_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on an unknown planet near the sun. The planet has dangerous radiation and weather for the majority of the day, so much of the story is set inside a cave where humans seek refuge. The cave is barren and cold, made only of stone. At dawn and sunset, the people are able to go out into the valley, where plants grow, fruits bloom, rivers thaw, and animals roam. The few minutes of lush, natural life on the planet are cherished by the characters in the story, but they always return to the cave to avoid radiation."}
{"id": "63874_2", "pid": "63874_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on a planet that is practically uninhabitable. The nights burn with cold, and the days feel like torches of fire. Because of this, the people must live in caves to stay alive. When dawn and sunset come, however, the entire planet blossoms with life, the air becomes breath-sweet and flower-strong. The ice thaws, and the fires die off too. All of the animals come out as well to enjoy what little life they can. There are avalanches, too, mostly consisting of stones that have been biding their time. In Sim\u2019s vision, there is a large metal spaceship just beyond the valley. He believes that it is the key to saving all of the people. When dawn comes, all of the plants flower, and pale green tendrils appear on rocks. There is also plenty of fruit to go around in that short time period. "}
{"id": "63874_3", "pid": "63874_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dark and Sim?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25919, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dark is the older sister to Sim. When both of their parents die from old age, on the eighth day of their existence, Dark takes over as a carrying role for Sim. She tries her best to impart knowledge to him about friends and enemies. Noticing the interactions Sim is having with other kids his age, she warns him about the violence that his future surely holds due to a new enemy. While she is not his mother and was not born much before him, she does take a protective role. She makes sure he is fed and defends him when he is being bullied. "}
{"id": "63874_3", "pid": "63874_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dark and Sim?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25919, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dark and Sim are brother and sister. They have a one-day difference, which is a lot on the planet. As other children, they are constantly eating to get knowledge. While the parents are alive, the two are too little to be close. When the parents die, the leave Dark to take care for Sim. She teaches him what she already knows and they share their thoughts about the knowledge they gain. They become really close during the day without parents. Dark is a friend, while Sim already has enemies. She warns her brother and says him what he should do. "}
{"id": "63874_3", "pid": "63874_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dark and Sim?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25919, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dark and Sim are siblings, Dark being one day older than Sim. Even when Sim is just born, he is able to see Dark and feel a connection with her, describing the feeling of their minds brushing. As Sim grows, he watches Dark model life for him. As they play in the valley, he notices the way she interacts with other children, and watches her eat in the cave. Though Dark is only one day older than Sim, time moves quickly, and she eventually must care for him when their parents die. She acts as a motherly figure to him, explaining life and making sure he eats and is protected."}
{"id": "63874_3", "pid": "63874_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Dark and Sim?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25919, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dark and Sim have a good sibling relationship. Dark is one day older than Sim, therefore making her age even faster than him. Before she dies, their mother tells Dark to look after Sim because he is younger. When their parents die, she holds Sim and cries. However, she does not disobey her parents and goes when they tell her to go play. Dark also does not let go of Sim, even when he tries to twist out of her grasp. She holds his hand during the funeral procession, and they stick together afterward. They chatter like birds, feed among the rocks, and exchange what they know about life. Later, Dark tries to break Chion apart from Sim and tells her brother that these enemies are made over small things such as food. She says that he must eat in order to defend himself and also catch up to Lyte. Dark is sad that her brother may very well have to fight for Lyte, so she tells him that he needs weapons. She worries a lot for her brother and always looks out for him."}
{"id": "63874_4", "pid": "63874_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is strange about the planet?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The planet is strange because of its extremes. The people that live on the planet have to spend most of their time in the caves because during most of the day the sun is too powerful and kills everything that it touches. At night, there is a cold, burning sensation. There are about two hours during the day, dawn and sunset, where the people are able to venture into the valley. During this time, the rivers flow, the flowers bloom, and the people enjoy the livable temperatures outside. Even more strange on the planet is the extreme aging that people go through. People only live 8 days. As a result, they mature, understand, grow, and age at an incredible pace. "}
{"id": "63874_4", "pid": "63874_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is strange about the planet?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The planet is unadapted for humans. Originally, there were no humans on it, but their ships crushed there, so they can't escape. The sun on the planet is so hot during the day that it causes flames, so every plant is burnt in a second. During the night everything is icy and the temperature are so low, that they make everything freeze in a second. Dawn and sunset are the only times when people can go outside, at these times the planet is beautiful, full of fruits and plants. The caves are the only places for escape as the temperatures there are normal. People grow really fast and the life-time is eight days. In hours children learn to speak, to walk and to understand various concepts. The knowledge is gained through food. "}
{"id": "63874_4", "pid": "63874_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is strange about the planet?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The planet is located very close to the sun. Because of this, the land is scorching hot during the day, making it impossible to be outside without being burned alive. The nights, however, are extremely cold, only permitting dawn and sunset for humans to be outdoors. Humans, having to adapt to the strange conditions of the planet, reside in the caves to hide from the climate, and their bodies were adjusted due to the radiation on the planet. The planet causes every human to grow rapidly and live for only eight days."}
{"id": "63874_4", "pid": "63874_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is strange about the planet?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25906, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The planet causes people to age much faster than normal. From his vision, Sim sees the people drenched in solar radiation, which causes their pulses to quicken to a thousand beats per minute. Their blood changes too, and old age comes very quickly. Instead of a normal human lifespan, these people all live and die within a week while being forced to hide in caves. Another strange thing about the planet is its weather. There are only two hours of the day where life can function as normal, and everything must go into hiding for the rest of the time. Even the plant life cannot sustain itself, being burned away or frozen whenever dawn and dusk are over. "}
{"id": "63874_5", "pid": "63874_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Sim gain his knowledge and absorb his surroundings?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25933, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "During his first day, Sim knows no words and has not yet spoken. Yet, he gains a lot of knowledge from images, old memories, and a telepathic type of awareness that seems to penetrate everything. He observes much of his surroundings and is upset by his analysis of the horror that occurs every day on the planet. On the second day of his existence, Sim readily and eagerly acquires more knowledge about social customs and how his society worked. "}
{"id": "63874_5", "pid": "63874_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Sim gain his knowledge and absorb his surroundings?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25933, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Children on the planet are constantly eating as food is the source of knowledge. People grow every minute and the length of life is eight days. Sim gains initial knowledge while he is in the womb. When he can't even move, he already understands basic concepts like family, danger, etc. Every minute he gains some new knowledge. He says his first word in a day. He walks the next morning. He starts talking to his sister and she shares her knowledge as she is older. He makes friends and enemies the next day and fall in love. People are constantly dying before him. He sees the ship and dreams to reach it and escape. "}
{"id": "63874_5", "pid": "63874_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Sim gain his knowledge and absorb his surroundings?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25933, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Despite Sim's young age, he is quickly conscious of the images around him, as soon as an hour after he is born. He is able to recognize his mother and father, and he soon watches as people in the cave die around him. Sim quickly grows accustomed to the concept of death and picks up on the idea that people only live for eight days. He learns by observing the people around him, watching as they go outside at certain parts of the day. Sim is also able to understand things through inherited memory, which allows him to comprehend ideas such as life. He learns to understand emotions such as love through his relationship with his family, and after his parents die, his sister Dark acts as his mentor."}
{"id": "63874_5", "pid": "63874_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day, cold-wracked by night\u2014and life condensed by radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the Ship\u2014if he only dared reach it and escape! ... but it was more than half an hour distant\u2014the limit of life itself!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.\n \n Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.\n \n There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.\n \n Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.\n \n The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.\n \n Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.\n \n Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desication and burning away of their flesh occurred.\n \n Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. \"No, no,\" she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.\n \n With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!\n \n \n With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave.\n \n\n \n The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!\n \n His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. \"Let me kill him!\" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. \"What has he to live for?\"\n \n \"No, no!\" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.\n\"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!\"\n \n The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.\n \n The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. \"I'll kill you!\" she said, glaring down at her husband. \"Leave my children alone.\"\n \n The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. \"One-eighth of her life's over, already,\" he gasped. \"And she doesn't know it. What's the use?\"\n \n As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.\n \n Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.\n \n The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. \"Feed the child,\" he said, exhaustedly. \"Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.\"\n \n Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.\n \n This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.\n \n It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.\n  And he would live exactly eight days.\n \n \n \n\n \n The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.\n \n Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.\n \n Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.\n \n This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.\n  Because in a few hours they'd be dead.\n \n \n This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?\n \n How had his people gotten into such a condition?\n \n As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.\n \n When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.\n \n So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?\n \n His eyes widened, another image came to focus.\n \n Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.\n \n His mind flexed.\n \n In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.\n \n The cliff groaned.\n \n Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.\n \n \"Dawn's coming,\" he said.\n \n \n\n II\n \n Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.\n \n The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.\n \n Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.\n \n The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.\n \n Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. \"Wait! Be careful!\" she cried to her husband.\n \n Sim felt his father crouch, listening.\n \n High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.\n \n \"Now!\" bellowed his father, and leaped out.\n \n An avalanche fell down at them!\n \n Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.\n \n With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.\n \n The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim's father burst out into laughter. \"Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!\" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. \"Pagh!\"\n \n Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. \"Fool! You might have killed Sim!\"\n \n \"I may yet,\" retorted the father.\n \n Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.\n \n Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.\n \n The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.\n \n This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.\n \n Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.\n \n The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue.\n \n His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.\n \n \n\n \n They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:\n \n \"Remember?\"\n \n Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they'd lived only seven days!\n \n The husband and wife looked at each other.\n \n \"Was it only three days ago?\" said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. \"I can't believe it. It is so unfair.\" She sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. \"Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago it was you!\"\n \n \"An hour is half a life.\"\n \n \"Come,\" she took her husband's arm. \"Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.\"\n \n \"The sun'll be up in a few minutes,\" said the old man. \"We must turn back now.\"\n \n \"Just one more moment,\" pleaded the woman.\n \n \"The sun will catch us.\"\n \n \"Let it catch me then!\"\n \n \"You don't mean that.\"\n \n \"I mean nothing, nothing at all,\" cried the woman.\n \n The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.\n \n \"Dark!\" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of green fruits, she joined them.\n \n The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.\n \n The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.\n \n Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.\n \n Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.\n \n \"He'll never make it,\" said father. \"Do not watch him, woman. It's not a good thing to watch.\"\n \n They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was\u2014strange thought\u2014a grown man!\n \n The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.\n \n The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming stopped.\n \n Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. \"We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.\"\n \n \"To you ,\" he nodded to her. \"To the children.\" They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.\n \n \n\n \n All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.\n \n Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.\n \n Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.\n \n He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.\n \n His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.\n \n \"Sunset,\" said his father, at last.\n \n The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.\n \n His mother arose. \"I want to see the outside world once more ... just once more....\" She stared blindly, shivering.\n \n His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.\n \n \"I cannot rise,\" he whispered faintly. \"I cannot.\"\n \n \"Dark!\" The mother croaked, the girl came running. \"Here,\" and Sim was handed to the girl. \"Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.\" She gave Sim one last fondling touch.\n \n Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.\n \n \"Go now,\" said the mother. \"Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.\"\n \n Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.\n \n \"Why...?\"\n \n He saw his mother stiffen. \"The child spoke!\"\n \n \"Aye,\" said his father. \"Did you hear what he said?\"\n \n \"I heard,\" said the mother quietly.\n \n The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n The night came and passed and then started the second day.\n \n The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.\n \n Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.\n \n At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?\n \n The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.\n \n The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.\n \n Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.\n \n Another piece of his life opened wide.\n \n Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.\n \n \"War!\"\n \n The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.\n \n But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?\n \n From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. \"Why, Dark, why?\"\n \n Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue, forever hungry.\n \n Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.\n \n The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.\n \n Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, \"This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!\"\n \n Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. \"Get on!\" she cried.\n\"What's your name, bad one?\"\n \n \"Chion!\" laughed the boy. \"Chion, Chion, Chion!\"\n \n Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene\u2014mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!\n \n Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:\n \n \"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!\"\n \n And he vanished around a rock.\n \n More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?\n \n Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. \"Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly.\" And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. \"You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger.\"\n \n But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.\n \n She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.\n \n Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.\n \n \"Your name?\" he shouted after her.\n \n \"Lyte!\" she called laughingly back.\n \n \"I'm Sim,\" he answered, confused and bewildered.\n \n \"Sim!\" she repeated it, flashing on. \"I'll remember!\"\n \n Dark nudged his ribs. \"Here, eat ,\" she said to the distracted boy.\n\"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her.\"\n \n From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. \"Lyte!\" he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. \"Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!\"\n \n Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. \"I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry\u2014the sun's coming!\"\n \n They ran back to the caves.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Sim gain his knowledge and absorb his surroundings?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25861, "query_start_index": 25863, "query_end_index": 25933, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sim gains knowledge as the days go by. The moment he is born, he begins to start learning about the world around him. Since humans only live for eight days, he is able to learn how to walk only one to two days after his birth. Despite being a baby for the first part of the story, he already has very intricate thoughts about wanting to live longer and how it is not fair that all the people will die so fast. When his parents take Dark and him out, his senses are honed, and he begins storing knowledge intensely. Sim begins to understand love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings, subtleties, realities, and reflections. Because of the lack of time, his mind seeks and interprets material on its own instead of having to wait for somebody to teach it new concepts. Just as his parents die, he learns how to speak. All of these changes seem to be the process of his short life. \n"}
{"id": "32890_1", "pid": "32890_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25365, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Steve Cantwell grew up in a desert village on Sirius' second planet, he lived with his aunt. It is one of the human colonies, and it has never been accepted by the Kumaji tribesmen - the natives who have been raiding the settlements for years. Steve went to Earth to get an education, but now he came back to the planet. He flew from Oasis City to his native village on a unicopter only to find the deserted buildings and poisoned water. A Kumaji, who lived with the earthmen, tells him that the natives poisoned the well - three people died, and everybody else had to leave their home and walk to Oasis City through the desert wasteland. Now the Kumaji are looking for them to kill. The man stayed here to die since he\u2019s too old to flee or fight. Steve gives him his water canteen and flies away to find the other citizens. Hours later, he spots a caravan with camels. He first meets Tobias Whiting, who was the most successful man in the village when Steve was a child. The man greets him coldly and soon informs Steve that his aunt was one of the people who died from the poisoned water. Then he introduces him to his daughter Mary, the young woman who charms Steve. Tobias says he had a profitable business, but all his money is gone now. Three days later, he disappears, taking Steve\u2019s unicopter with him. The other members suppose that Tobias decided to trade the caravan\u2019s location for his profits, thus betraying them. Mary and Steve take some food and head towards the Kumaji base to the north of the caravan since Tobias probably decided to fly there. Four days later, they spot the empty unicopter and realize that Tobias must\u2019ve reached the base by now. They keep walking and soon surrender to the Kumajis, who put them in a circular tent where they meet Tobias. He explains to Mary that he wants to give her the life she deserves. Now he\u2019s determined to tell the Kumaji everything since his daughter got captured, and the Kumaji might torture her for information. Steve devises an escape plan: at night, he makes Tobias scream for a second to make one of the guards come in. Steve kills this one Kumaji, but the guard manages to lethally wound Tobias while fighting with the attacker. Whiting blesses Mary and Steve and orders them to leave, promising that he\u2019ll deceive the Kumaji and not share the true location of the caravan. The couple runs from the tent, and Steve kills several more guards before gliding off on the thlot\u2019s - desert animal - back with Mary. They reach the caravan two days later and decide to tell everyone that Whiting initially went to the Kumaji to save everyone. Mary admits to Steve that she loves him."}
{"id": "32890_1", "pid": "32890_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25365, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Steve Cantwell reaches a village after coming in his unicopter from Oasis City. He thinks about his childhood memories as he walks around, sadly thinking about living in the mud-house with his aunt after his parents were killed in a Kumaji raid, and the community center. As he tries the water, he realizes it is poisoned and stuffs sand in his mouth. As he goes into his aunt\u2019s house, an old Kumaji appears and tells him that everyone left. Steve thinks about the Kumaji raids from when he was a boy, and the old one talks about how the poisoned well was the last straw for the colonists to leave for Oasis City. Steve offers to take the old man with him in the unicopter, but he refuses and insists that the town is his home. Steve then goes to look for his people in the desert, and he finds them hiking through the desert. Steve goes to introduce himself again, but a man named Tobias Whiting only responds to him bitterly. He tells Steve that his aunt was one of the people who died, and his daughter Mary Whiting meets up with them later. Tobias Whiting complains about never having money because of the Kumaji, but Mary Whiting gives him a smile. Tobias disappears three days later, and he takes Steve\u2019s unicopter on the fourth night to go and retrieve his fortune. Mary slaps Gort, but he asks Steve how far Tobias will get with the unicopter. They get captured by the Kumaji and see that Tobias is waiting for them at the camp. Mary asks her father why he did what he did, and Steve asks if he has told them the information yet. At night, Mary asks if Steve has gone to sleep yet. Tobias is clearly asleep, and Mary is furious about her father betraying their people. Steve threatens to kill Tobias, but he ends up killing a guard instead. Tobias, however, is injured by the pike and lays there in pain. He asks Mary if Steve is the person she wants, and he tells the two of them to go south with the rest of the Earthmen. Tobias reassures them that he will live long enough to deceive the Kumaji. Steve escapes with Mary, killing a few more of the Kumaji before taking off on the thlot. They ride off into the distance, letting the sand obstruct their trail. Steve promises that they will tell the rest of the colony that Mary\u2019s father died as a hero, and she proclaims her love for him. The two of them know that they will reach Oasis City safely, and there is a new world out in space. "}
{"id": "32890_1", "pid": "32890_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25365, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows Steve Cantwell, a young Earthmen who has returned from being educated on Earth back to his home in the Sirian desert. Upon arrival, he finds his village hastily abandoned - including his aunt - and the well poisoned. He finds an old Kumaji man in the community center, who informs him of what happened. The Kumaji tribesmen had raided the village as they felt the colony took up an oasis belonging to their own nomadic needs. By poisoning the well, the colonists were forced to travel by foot and camel across the arid desert to try and reach Oasis City, located 500 miles away. \n\nCantwell decides to hop into his unicopter to meet the travelling caravan and warn them of the Kumaji. He insists theres room for the old man, but the old man chooses to stay and die in his home. Reluctantly, Cantwell leaves the old man with the remaining water his in canteen. Later, Cantwell finds the caravan and reunites with familiar faces from his boyhood. This includes Tobias Whiting, previously the Colony's most successful man through his trading and business with the Kumajis, his daughter Mary, and some other childhood friends. Whiting describes how despite his relationship with the Kumajis and supposed riches, he and his daughter are forced to escape as refugees as well. \n\nDays after travelling with the caravan, Whiting disappears with Cantwell's unicopter. After discussing with some of the colony members, it is suggested that Whiting had gone off with the intention of trading with the Kumajis again: the colony's location in return for his money. Steve and Mary decide to follow and stop him. After a couple days travel, they find the unicopter crashed. Though initially reassured by the fact that Whiting was alive, they soon get spotted and captured by a band of Kumajis. Led to the Kumajis' encampment, they are met by Whiting. It seems that even if Whiting has changed his mind, the presence of his daughter and Cantwell could mean that the Kumajis were willing to torture the information of out Whiting regardless. \n\nAt night, Steve enacts a plan. He pretends to choke Whiting and draws the attention of the guard. They enter a scuffle, with the guard dying, but not without Whiting having taken a fatal stabbing from the guard's pike. Whiting vows instead to misinform the Kumajis on the caravan's location, and insists on the Steve getting Mary out safely. The pair manage to escape on a stolen thlotback and as they ride up to the caravan, plan to tell Whiting's demise as a hero.  "}
{"id": "32890_1", "pid": "32890_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25365, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story revolves around Steve Cantwell, a human raised on a desert planet who decides to return home after years away.. When he arrives at his village, he sees the whole village is deserted, and attacked. The water well is poisoned, and the only person that he can find is an old man that tells him what happened. After overpopulation on earth increased dramatically, many humans turned to other planets to colonize. This desert planet was an example of that. The humans who lived in this village had always had trouble with the native tribe, as they weren\u2019t happy that the humans arrived at their home. This led to constant raids by the tribe, and is eventually what led to the humans abandoning the village to live in a city 500 miles away. After the old man told him what happened, Steve leaves in his ship to find the caravan of the surviving humans, as the old man wanted to stay in the village. After Steve finds them, he meets with people from the village, most of which remember him. Together, they continue their journey towards the large city and towards safety from the natives. One day, one of the men of the party takes Steve\u2019s ship. It is assumed that he wanted to negotiate with the natives, as he had a lot of money with them. In return, the man would give them the location of the rest of the humans. Steve and the man\u2019s daughter leave in order to find him and stop when. After getting captured by the natives, they meet with the man again, who wants to go ahead with his plan of betraying the rest of the humans. Steve understands that this can\u2019t happen, so he lures a guard in and kills him. In the process, the man dies, but manages to go back on his plan and sends the natives to a wrong location. Steve and the daughter leave, excited to meet up with the others and start a new life in the city. "}
{"id": "32890_2", "pid": "32890_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tobias Whiting and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25402, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tobias is a well-muscled, handsome man in his mid-forties. He is the Colony\u2019s official trader with the Kumajis. Steve believed him to have been the most successful man in the Colony before the events of the story. The water in his village gets poisoned by the Kumaji. He, together with his daughter and other citizens, is forced to abandon his home and walk through the desert to Oasis City, leaving all his treasures and assets behind. The Kumajis are trying to chase them and kill the Colony. At some point in their journey, he meets Steve, who found the caravan on his unicopter. Several days later, Tobias decides to steal the unicopter and fly to the Kumaji\u2019s base fifty miles due north of their stop and trade the caravan\u2019s location for his money. He\u2019s kept in one of the tents, and soon Mary and Steve join him. Now that his daughter is a prisoner, he\u2019s eager to share the location of the caravan and save her from torture. At night Steve whispers that he will kill Tobias, and the man screams. Steve quickly silences him and attacks the coming guard. The Kumaji loses the battle with Steve but stabs Tobias in the stomach. He realizes that he won\u2019t be able to leave the camp alive, so he blesses Mary and Steve and promises to give the Kumaji the wrong direction and save the caravan."}
{"id": "32890_2", "pid": "32890_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tobias Whiting and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25402, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tobias Whiting is the father of Mary Whiting. He is described to be the colony\u2019s most successful man when Steve was a boy. However, there is now bitterness, bleak self-pity, and defeat evident in his eyes. Physically, he is in his mid-forties now. He is well-muscled, flesh solid, and walks with bold steps. He also has a craggy and handsome face. Tobias used to be very rich, by the colony standards, because he primarily traded with the Kumajis. Now, he has lost all of his money to them. He deeply cares for his daughter Mary, taking good care of her when they have to flee with the rest of the colony. Tobias, however, decides to steal Steven\u2019s unicopter to go back to the Kumaji under the guise of getting his fortune back. When they meet him at the camp, he tells them that he is discussing a settlement with the Kumaji. Later, Tobias is gravely injured by the pike of the guard after he is attacked by Steve. He still wishes nothing but for Mary\u2019s happiness, so he tells Steve to take her south with the rest of the colony. He says that he will give the Kumaji false information to better help the colony escape. "}
{"id": "32890_2", "pid": "32890_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tobias Whiting and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25402, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tobias Whiting is a mid-fourties Earthman who belonged to the colony in the desert. He is described to be well-muscled with a strong stride and a handsome face. He has a daughter, Mary Whiting. Whiting was the Colony's official trader with the Kumajis and had grown rich because of his business with them. Despite this relationship with the Kumajis, he and his daughter were forced to escape with the rest of their colony. He remains bitter over the fact that wherever the colony escapes to, he and his daughter will be poor even with their supposed riches, which are tied up with a Kumaji moneylender. \n\nIn the middle of the journey, Whiting disappears with Cantwell's unicopter. It is deduced that he took off with the unicopter with the intention of informing the Kumajis, at a base not too far away, of the caravan's location in return for his money. Whiting successfully makes it to the Kumajis' base, and after running into his daughter and Cantwell, he remains steadfast on his decision because they might choose to torture his daughter for information. After a scuffle with the Kumaji guard, Whiting is fatally stabbed on accident by the guard's pike. Knowing he will soon die, Whiting promises to lead the Kumajis astray with the wrong information and wishes his daughter and Cantwell off. "}
{"id": "32890_2", "pid": "32890_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tobias Whiting and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25402, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tobias Whiting is one of the humans who settled on the desert planet, and who was a constant victim of the natives\u2019 violence. Tobias and his daughter Mary are also part of the survivors of the last attack, which forces them to move away towards a large city. Tobias is revealed to have been a very wealthy man, and had a lot of business with the natives. After Steve meets up with them, Tobias decides to steal Steve\u2019s ship and negotiate with the natives who were hunting them. Steve wants to get his money back in return for giving up the location of the other humans. After Steve and Mary find him, he dies while they try to escape, but just before dying he changes his mind and sends the natives to the wrong location. "}
{"id": "32890_3", "pid": "32890_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25369, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in the twenty-second century: the Earth government is seeking colonies in many places. One of them is on Sirius\u2019 second planet. Steve spent his early childhood here in a human settlement in the middle of a desert, but he went to Earth to get an education. Now he got back to Oasis City, which is built at the confluence of two underground rivers and is 500 miles from his home Colony. At the beginning, Steve flies across the desert to his village: it looks abandoned. He walks from the well with water to his aunt\u2019s house and soon finds the dying Kumaji. Later, Steve flies above the desert dunes and spots the caravan. He lands there and spends the next several days with the people walking east to Oasis City. Then Steve and Mary go to the north - to the Kumaji base. They surrender, and the Kumaji take them both to a small encampment. In a secular tent, they find Mary\u2019s Father. When it\u2019s dark, Mary and Steve sneak out of the tent and soon glide off across the sand on the thlot\u2019s back. "}
{"id": "32890_3", "pid": "32890_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25369, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The village that Steve first visits is his childhood home. There is a strong desert heat in the area and many deserted mud-houses. All of the families draw their water from a single well, and there is also a community center too. Inside of his aunt\u2019s house, there is a set table, a coffee pot on the stove, and the remains of last night\u2019s partially-consumed dinner. Outside, there is only hot desert sand and haze from the heat. The colonists also have imported camels to help them as well. There are also many sandhills and a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. Many small, six-legged creatures glide across the desert. At the Kumaji encampment, there is a circular tent for the prisoners. "}
{"id": "32890_3", "pid": "32890_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25369, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story is set in a desert on Sirius' second planet, where an Earth colony has taken residence. The colony's village is lined with deserted mud-brick houses, a community center, and a single well, with some of the houses damaged due to the Kumaji's raids. \n\nMost of the story takes place on the road, where the caravan journeys across the desert to reach Oasis City, 500 miles away. The Sirian desert had nothing but vast miles of dry sand and heat and the camels that the colonists brought. Occasionally, the characters in the story will come across a small spring for drinkable water. \n\nThe latter part of the story takes place in a Kumaji encampment, where the characters are imprisoned in a circular tent.  "}
{"id": "32890_3", "pid": "32890_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the Setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25369, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on a desert planet, which is inhabited by a native race. The planet is very arid, and it is described to have different villages and cities. The village in which Steve grew up in, has a large water well in the middle, which gets poisoned by the natives. After this, the humans are trying to reach a large city inhabited by more humans. This city is called Oasis City, and it is located between two rivers. The natives live in large camps, and ride animals called Thlots, which allows them to move quickly in the desert. \n\n"}
{"id": "32890_4", "pid": "32890_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Kumaji's in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Kumaji are the native tribesmen, and they have been raiding the Colony for many years. They also killed Steve\u2019s parents in the past. Now they poison the village\u2019s well, and his aunt dies from this water. They practically force the citizens to leave their homes and walk through the desert. The Kumaji are looking for the caravan to kill everyone else who remains alive. They have Tobias\u2019 money which upsets him and makes him initially betray his people and try to trade their location for his fortune. They take him, Steve, and Mary captive and then end up being unable to stop the last two from running away. "}
{"id": "32890_4", "pid": "32890_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Kumaji's in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Kumaji\u2019s in the story are the main enemies of the colonists. They are the ones behind the raids, one of which killed Steve\u2019s parents. The Kumajis are also described to be significant because they are the reason why the caravan has to leave as quickly as they can. Even though the poisoned water is the last straw, the Kumaji are also out to hunt the colonists and kill them. They are also the reason why Tobias Whiting decides to go to their camp, in hopes of deceiving them so that the rest of the colony can reach Oasis City safely. Everybody mistakenly believes, however, that Tobias is planning to betray them for money. Even so, the Kumaji are the reason why Tobias can be regarded as a hero and have his moment to make the ultimate sacrifice."}
{"id": "32890_4", "pid": "32890_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Kumaji's in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In this story, the Kumajis are portrayed as the enemy. They prey on the defenceless villagers by poisoning the only water supply and doggedly chase after them in the arid desert. However, the presence of the Kumajis are significant because it could be interpreted that the Earthmen are the enemy instead, as we are told in the story that this planet was first inhabited by the Kumajis and the desert is actually a part of their land. This is attributed by the Kumajis' natural ability to survive in the desert, as well as their command over the thlotback desert animals. "}
{"id": "32890_4", "pid": "32890_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Kumaji's in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Kumaji\u2019s are the native species in the story. They are very violent creatures, and constantly raid the colonies of humans in their country. They are described to be of a purple color, and seem to be very similar to the humans, except for the skin color. The Kumaji\u2019s are a very important part of the plot, as they are who drive the humans out of Steve\u2019s village and into a desert trek. Even after the humans left the village, they still wanted to hunt them down in their path to Oasis City."}
{"id": "32890_5", "pid": "32890_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the old man in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25388, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "When Steve arrives at the Colony, he sees deserted buildings and realizes that the well water is poisoned. The old man - the Kumaji who lived with the humans - tells him that the day before, three people died from the poisoned drinking water. The Kumaji are behind this and are trying to locate the others who left the Colony. They want to find the caravan, and even though the desert wind will wipe out the humans' trail, they still need to be informed about this danger. Knowing all of this allows Steve to find the caravan and eventually save them from the Kumaji, who could learn their location from Tobias Whiting. "}
{"id": "32890_5", "pid": "32890_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the old man in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25388, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nThe old man serves as a guide for Steve in the story. Initially, he is the one who tells him about the colonists leaving because of the poisoned water. He also explains that the Kumaji are out to get them and that the colonists are desperate to get to Oasis City. His words also give Steve the motivation to go and help his people, despite being away for so long on Earth. Furthermore, the old man is also proof that Kumaji and humans can live together. Although he is a Kumaji, he has lived with humans and can speak perfect English. He does not hold any malice and even says that this is the only home he has ever had. Therefore, he will not leave this place and wishes Steve good luck to helping his people. "}
{"id": "32890_5", "pid": "32890_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the old man in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25388, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The old man plays the role of the messenger. He has a strong role in the beginning of the story and sets up young Steve Cantwell with the background of what happened to the colony, as well as driving him with the mission of catching up to the travelling colony in order to warn them of the pursuing Kumajis. \n\nHe is significant because the old man, by face, is a Kumaji. Despite this, he has lived with the Earth colony and is insistent on dying in the village, which he proclaims as his town. This hints at the fact that Kumajis and the Earthmen could have actually cohabited peacefully, and even form strong bonds when their communities interacted and lived with each other.  "}
{"id": "32890_5", "pid": "32890_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\n \n\n By ADAM CHASE\n \n \n [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\n \n\n\n How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\n \n \n Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n \n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n \n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n \n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n \n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n \n Poisoned.\n \n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n \n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth\u2014too\n late for anything.\n \n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n \n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n \n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n \n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n \n \"What happened here?\"\n \n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n \n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n \n \"The Kumaji\u2014\"\n \n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n \n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n \n \"But you stayed here\u2014\"\n \n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\n \n \n \n Steve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n \n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n \n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n \n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n \n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\n \n \n \n Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness\u2014to the safety of Oasis City\u2014or\n death.\n \n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n \n \"You're going after them?\"\n \n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n \n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n \n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n \n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n \n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n \n \"But you can't\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n \n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\n \n \n \n Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n \n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n \n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n \n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East\u2014and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n \n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n\"I'm one of you.\"\n \n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n \n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich\u2014by colony standards\u2014at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others\u2014either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n \n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n \n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n \n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n \n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity\u2014pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\n \n \n \n The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face\u2014it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized\u2014was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n \n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n \n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n \n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I\u2014I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n \n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n \n He appreciated it.\n \n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n \n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n \n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n \n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n \n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\n \n \n \n Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n \n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n \n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n \n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n \n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money\u2014with the\n Kumaji.\"\n \n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n \n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n \n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n \n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n \n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him\u2014not by a long sight.\"\n \n \"No?\" someone asked.\n \n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\n \n \n \n Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n \n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n \n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n \n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n \n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n \n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n \n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us\u2014or are led to us\u2014and attack.\"\n \n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n \n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be\u2014dying.\"\n \n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n \n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n \n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\n \n \n \n The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n \n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n \n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n \n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n \n \"To go\u2014to them?\"\n \n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n \n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?\"\n \n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n \n \"North?\"\n \n \"North.\"\n \n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n \n Steve said nothing. The answer\u2014capture or death\u2014was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n \n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n \n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n \n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n \n \n \n \"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n \n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n \n \"Mary....\"\n \n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n \n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n \n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n \n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n \n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n \n \"It doesn't matter now. I\u2014I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way\u2014we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n \n \"They can do\u2014what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n \n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n \n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n \n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n \n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n \n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n \n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do\u2014whatever you have to do. I\u2014I'll understand.\"\n \n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps\u2014but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n \n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\n \n \n \n Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n \n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n \n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n \n \"No,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing\u2014like a baby. As if\u2014as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n \n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there\u2014not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n \n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there\u2014squeezing.\n \n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard\u2014or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\n \n \n \n They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n \n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n \n \"Steve!\"\n \n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n \n \"It's Dad. Dad was\u2014hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad\u2014\"\n \n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n \n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n \n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n \n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is\u2014he\u2014what\n you want?\"\n \n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n \n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n \n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n \n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them\u2014due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go\u2014south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll\u2014all\u2014get away. If it's\u2014what you want, Mary.\"\n \n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n \n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n \n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to\u2014all of you. From a\u2014very foolish\u2014man....\"\n \n \n \n Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n \n Pursuit was disorganized\u2014and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n \n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n\"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n \n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n \n \"And not\u2014not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n \n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n \n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n \n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n \n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the old man in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25323, "query_start_index": 25325, "query_end_index": 25388, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The old man is a very important figure in the plot. After Steve finds his village abandoned and dead, the old man is the only one who stayed behind. He is also revealed to be of the Kumaji species, but he has lived with the humans in the village for such a long time that he has no ties to them. He helps Steve figure out what happened, and tells him where the people went in order for Steve to find them. He ends up staying in the village, even though Steve offered to take him to the others. He did this because he was already dying, and wanted to die in his village. "}
{"id": "29193_1", "pid": "29193_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23294, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The plot follows Sol, a veteran of the U.S. army who, after picking up a hitchhiker on the way to a wedding, gets his car robbed near a small town. He ends up staying in the house of a young family who are kind enough to host him. They are very nice with him, and even offer him breakfast the next morning. As Sol learns more of the town and the family, he learns that the people in the town share the same dream every night, in a place called the Armagon. He also learns that there was an execution last night in the same place. He follows Willie Dawes, the head of the family, to pick up the body of the person that was executed. They are also accompanied by the sheriff of the town and by a man named Charlie. When Sol sees the body of the executed person, he starts to get worried and starts asking people in the town questions about the Armagon. That night, Sol stays with the Dawes family again, and when he goes to sleep he meets with the townspeople in the Armagon, where it seems that he will be executed. \n\n"}
{"id": "29193_1", "pid": "29193_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23294, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sol Becker meets a woman at the doorway who looks like a mom from a homey cartoon. She is confused by why Sol is at her door, and he explains that he is a hitchhiker going to Salinas. She lets him come into her house, where he asks if he can stay the night. She explains that he does not have to pay and rushes back upstairs so she will not miss the execution. Sol goes to sleep and is woken up again by a little girl named Sally. He asks what time it is, but Sally responds that she likes poached eggs. Sol desperately tries to get her to leave, but Mom sends her away. Sol tries to call Fred but is met with indifference; a man named Willie Dawes offers to take him to the sheriff as Mom finishes breakfast. They talk about Armagon during breakfast, which is a place that everybody dreams about at night. Sol asks about the execution again, but Dawes tells him to eat his breakfast. They enter a wooden building to meet Charlie, and Dawes mentions that they are picking up Sheriff Coogan too. As they discuss with the other people, Sol realizes that everybody dreams about Armagon. Charlie is the Prince Regent, and they meet the sheriff too. The men go to the shop to find Mrs. Brundage, who is in grief because of her husband. Sol tries to ask what had happened in Armagon, but Mrs. Brundage refuses to tell him. Everybody is more worried about Mr. Brundage, so Sol goes on a walk and tries to ask about Armagon. Everybody says that it is none of his business, so he has no choice but to stay in the town until his car is found. Sally comes home at five thirty and asks if he is going to stay, and Mom refuses to hear anything about pay. Sol tries to ask Mr. Dawes for some more information again, but he refuses to say anything. When Sol goes to sleep that night, he finds himself awake in Armagon. Sally, Mom, and Mr. Dawes have returned wearing much finer clothing, indicating a higher status. Charlie asks if this is the snooper, and Dawes tells him that he should round up the knights. Sally screams for execution, and the knights begin to appear. They point the tips of their sharp spears at him as Sol wonders if he will ever awake."}
{"id": "29193_1", "pid": "29193_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23294, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sol Becker was driving to the wedding in Salinas - his old army friend Fred was getting married. Late at night, he picked up a hitchhiker who minutes later pushed Sol out of the car and drove away, leaving the man soaking near an unknown village. He knocked at the door of a village house, and a woman - he called her Mom - let him in. Sol briefly told her what had happened, and she allowed him to sleep on the couch. Anxiously whispering that she would miss some execution, Mom went upstairs, leaving Sol confused but grateful. He got woken up by a little girl named Sally, pestering him with awkward questions - Mom told her to stop and get ready for breakfast. Minutes later, he found a telephone and called Fred, who didn\u2019t seem very upset by the news of Sol probably missing the wedding. After hanging up the phone, Sol talked to a man called Dawes, who promised to take him to Sheriff Coogan to report the car theft after breakfast. Mom called out that the breakfast was ready. Sally told Sol about Armagon - a place both parents and the daughter dreamt about every night. She also started talking about some execution, but Dawes coldly refused to answer Sol\u2019s questions about this. Before meeting the sheriff, Sol and Dawes crossed the street and picked up a man named Charlie or, as Dawes said, Prince Regent. As they were marching down the street, they met a woman who, Sol eventually realized, was also dreaming about Armagon. They finally came to the sheriff\u2019s house. He listened to Sol\u2019s story while they all were walking to a barbershop to pick up the body of a man called Brundage. They saw a crying woman - the wife of the dead, and Sol again made an attempt to understand who got killed and why. Soon, they came back with the body and told Sol to wait while they were carrying it somewhere else. Sol took a walk and again tried to ask citizens about the mystery place from their dreams but didn\u2019t get much information. He then went back to the Dawes residence. A State Trooper asked him some questions about the car and told him to remain in town until further notice. Sol ate lunch, walked for a bit, and returned in the evening. Sally - the daughter - clutched his leg and then started telling him about her day. Mr.Dawes came later and asked Sol about his questions to the citizens and then wondered if the man was a reporter. After a quiet evening, they all went to bed. Sol fell asleep and suddenly realized he was somewhere else, surrounded by marble pillars. He saw Sally running around in a white toga, then the sheriff chasing her. He finally saw Dawes dressed as a king who welcomed Becker to Armagon. The king unexpectedly asked Charlie to round up the knights, and Sally started triumphantly screaming: \u201cExecution!\u201d. Sol asked them to stop, but the knights kept approaching. "}
{"id": "29193_1", "pid": "29193_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23294, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sol Becker, an engineer whose car is stolen by a hitchhiker on his way to Salinas for his friend\u2019s wedding, asks for a stay in a house. The owner of the house is a family with parents and a kid. On the first night when Sol makes himself in the house, he sleeps in the living room and notices Mom of the family hurry upstairs to join a court. The following morning, Sol is woken by their daughter, Sally, who asks him weird questions. After Mom orders Sally to leave Sol alone to let him dress, Sol borrows the phone to talk to his friend, whose wedding he will miss. After that, he meets Mr. Dawes, the father of Sally, and they eat breakfast together.\n\nAt the table, Sol learns that the family dreams of going to the same place called Armagon every night, where there is a palace, and execution happens there. After breakfast, Mr. Dawes takes Sol to seek Sheriff Coogan. On their way, they meet Charlie, who is called Prince Regent. Charlie joins them, and they find the Sheriff. They go to a barbershop, where the owner\u2019s wife, Mrs. Brundage, is sobbing because her husband died. The three men from the town go into the house and carry the corpse out. Sol tries to know the truth by asking Mrs. Brundage, but he is scolded for not being respectful. After seeing the men deal with the corpse, he takes a walk in the town. During his walk, Sol realizes everyone in the town dreams of going to the same place every night. He learns little about the place. When he gets back to the house, he is allowed to stay for one more night. At night, after he falls asleep, he finds himself in a palace where Sally and Charlie are playing. When Mr. Dawes finds him, he orders Charlie to gather the Knights. The Knights surround Sol, and he realizes that he may not be able to wake again, just like Mr. Brundage.\n"}
{"id": "29193_2", "pid": "29193_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Willie Dawes, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23318, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Willie is the head of the family that hosts and helps Sol after his car was stolen. He seems to have a lot of influence in the town, as he helps the sheriff in his day to day tasks and everyone in the town knows him. He is described as a tall and skinny man. He is also married to Mom, which is the woman that first received Sol after his car was stolen. Together she and Willie have a child called Sally. At the end, it is revealed that Willie is actually the king of the Armagon, which is why he has so much influence in the town. "}
{"id": "29193_2", "pid": "29193_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Willie Dawes, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23318, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Willie Dawes is the husband of Mom and the father of Sally. He is a tall and rangy man, with a bobbing Adam\u2019s apple and a lined face. When he first meets Sol, he is sympathetic to the man\u2019s situation and tells him that they can go see the sheriff after breakfast. He is also very caring towards his family as well, always eating with Mom and Sally at home. He is very quick to correct Sally\u2019s mistakes as well, when she mispronounces Armagon and execution. However, although Dawes seems friendly, he can turn cold when provoked. Whenever Sol asks about Armagon, Dawes responds coldly and changes the subject. He is also cautious around Sol too, believing that the other man is a reporter who is here to expose the secret of the town. However, Dawes later shows an authoritative side too, donning magnificent attire and living up to his title as a King. "}
{"id": "29193_2", "pid": "29193_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Willie Dawes, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23318, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Willie Dawes is the head of the Dawes household, Mom\u2019s husband, Sally\u2019s father, and, apparently, a king of Armagon. He seems relatively friendly and approachable when he first meets Sol and promises to take him over to the sheriff. Dawes is rather outgoing - a lot of citizens know him. Still, he is very protective of their town\u2019s dream of Armagon. So whenever Sol asks about this place or the execution, Dawes becomes cold, stern, and uneasy. He plainly refuses to answer the first questions about it and then later makes sure Sol is not a prying journalist who wants to write about Armagon. Dawes also seems rational and emotionless when it comes to Armagon\u2019s laws and those who breach them. For example, he pragmatically approaches the death of Vincent Brundage, who got executed for breaking a rule, and considers his punishment necessary.  "}
{"id": "29193_2", "pid": "29193_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Willie Dawes, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23318, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Willie Dawes is the owner of the house where Sol Becker, an engineer who loses his car on his way to a friend\u2019s wedding, borrows for a stay. He is called \u201cPa\u201d by his wife, and he often calls her \u201cMa.\u201d Mr. Dawes is tall and rangy. He is short-tempered, and whenever Sol asks about the dream place, he tells Sol to mind his own business coldly. He gets annoyed by Sol\u2019s questions often. Mr. Dawes walks so fast that Sol has to try hard to catch up with him when walking in the town. Mr. Dawes seems to make a speech in the dream place the first night that Sol stays in their house. He goes to the barbershop with the other two men, carrying Mr. Brundage\u2019s corpse, who seems to die of a heart attack. He seems to be the king in the dream place, where he wears magnificent attire."}
{"id": "29193_3", "pid": "29193_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23310, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mrs. Brundage is one of the townspeople that live in the town that Sol got robbed in. She and her Husband own a barber shop, in which her husband was the barber. It is revealed that the execution in the Armagon from the first night was in fact Mr. Brundage, and that he was executed for breaking the rules. When Sol and Mr. Dawes picks up the body, she seems very distraught and sad, but she seems to understand the repercussions of her husband\u2019s actions. "}
{"id": "29193_3", "pid": "29193_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23310, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mrs. Brundage is the wife of Vincent Brundage. When Sol arrives in town, her husband has been executed. Mom explains that she has to give Mrs. Brundage a call the next day to comfort her. When they go to the parlor, Mrs. Brundage is in a housecoat with her hair in curlers and has puffy red eyes. She has been grieving all day, even though the others have come to collect Brundage\u2019s body. She tries to plead with them, saying that her husband did nothing wrong. She insists that it was all because he was too stubborn, even though the others say that it had to be this way. Even though she continues to cry as Brundage\u2019s body is taken out, she refuses to say anything about Armagon to Sol."}
{"id": "29193_3", "pid": "29193_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23310, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mrs. Brundage is one of the citizens of the town. She\u2019s Vincent Brundage\u2019s wife and one of the people who visit Armagon at night. She witnesses the trial and the execution of her husband who apparently broke one of the laws. In the morning after his death, she gets visited by Dawes, Charlie, Sheriff Coogan, and Sol who is a stranger to her. The first three come to the barbershop to pick up the body. Becker tries to learn something from her about her husband\u2019s trial or Armagon but she quickly leaves crying. At some point, she also gets a call from Mom"}
{"id": "29193_3", "pid": "29193_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23310, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mrs. Brundage is the wife of Vincent Brundage, the owner of a barbershop who seems to break the law in the dream place and get executed. Mrs. Brundage sobs when Mr. Dawes and the other three men come to her home because her husband died of a heart attack. She gets a call from Mrs. Dawes around ten about her husband\u2019s death. She wears a housecoat, has her hair in curlers, and has swollen and red eyes. When Sol keeps asking her questions about her husband\u2019s death and the dream place, she is shocked and cannot bear to take more, so she goes inside the house. When Mr. Dawes and the other two men carry her husband\u2019s corpse out, she is weeping behind them. When they all leave, she slams the door."}
{"id": "29193_4", "pid": "29193_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mom, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23309, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mom is the wife of Willie Dawes, and is the kind woman who received Sol when his car was robbed and he was wet from the rain. She was very kind to give him the sofa, after which she hurried up to her room to attend the Armagon execution. She seems to be a very good mom, and she enjoys cooking for her family. She is very helpful to Sol, but she also makes it clear that she isn\u2019t going to go out of her way to help him more, like he has to sleep on the sofa and that breakfast is at 7. "}
{"id": "29193_4", "pid": "29193_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mom, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23309, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mom is the first person Sol meets when he arrives at her doorstep in the rain. She is described to look like a mother from the homier political cartoons. She is plump, apple-cheeked, and white-haired. She also wears a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and a well-worn houserobe when she meets Sol. Mom is very kind, instantly welcoming Sol inside of the house and letting him sleep on the couch. Although she apologizes about the temporary accommodations, she is kind enough to refuse any form of payment from Sol. Mom is also a very good cook, as she is in charge of making all of the meals in the house. Despite Mom\u2019s kind side, she is also a strict parent towards Sally. She often tells her to stop annoying their guest and tells her to brush her teeth before anything. Mom also looks out for the other townspeople too, giving Mrs. Brundage a phone call after her husband is executed. When Sol reaches Armagon, Mom is wearing regal scarlet robes and scolding Sally to give the sheriff his helmet back. "}
{"id": "29193_4", "pid": "29193_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mom, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23309, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mom is the second adult in the Dawes household and Sally\u2019s mother. She is very kind and selfless. She allows Sol, a total stranger who knocks at her door at three at night, to sleep on their sofa and gives him a towel to clean himself. She makes him breakfast in the morning and refuses his money. Mom asks Dawes to help Sol get to the sheriff. She also decides to call Mrs. Brundage after her husband Vincent gets executed to express her condolences. She is a relatively good mother who can handle Sally\u2019s rebellious nature and also a rather generous host who feeds her entire family and Sol every day. "}
{"id": "29193_4", "pid": "29193_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mom, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23309, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mom is the housewife of the Dawes family, the wife of Mr. Dawes. She is called \u201cMa\u201d by Mr. Dawes. She is plump, having apple cheeks and white hair. She wears a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown when Sol Becker, an engineer who lost his car on his way to a friend\u2019s wedding, asks for a stay. She welcomes Sol to stay in their house and lets him sleep on the sofa. She is a cheerful woman when preparing the family\u2019s meals. She is always busy in the kitchen, and she often educates Sally, her daughter, about not doing something inappropriate. She is strict with Sally. Sometimes, she gets confused between day and night because she goes to the dream place every night. In addition, she is a sympathetic woman because she remembers to call Mrs. Brundage to comfort her after the loss of her husband. When Sol asks for another stay in the house, she agrees and insists that he does not need to pay for it."}
{"id": "29193_5", "pid": "29193_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the dream of townspeople?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The dream of the townspeople is what makes the town unique, and what puts Sol in danger. At the beginning Sol thought that the Dawes family shared a dream, but then he learned that everyone in the town had the same dream every night together. Also, the dream is a courtroom style, where Dawes is the king and can execute people. Charlie, the fat man that helps Dawes, is one of the knights in the Armagon. At the end, Sol attends this shared dream and it is implied that he is going to be killed by Dawes and the others. "}
{"id": "29193_5", "pid": "29193_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the dream of townspeople?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The dream of the townspeople is significant because it transports all of them to Armagon. Whenever they dream, they can go to an alternate reality that is completely different from the town. It is also worth noting that people, such as Dawes or Sally, suddenly become royalty whenever they dream. The townspeople also dream of the town every night, and it is considered to be a town secret that should not be easily told to anybody else. Since Armagon is their world, the townspeople all fulfill their roles in it. Some of the faces become knights, while others are in positions of power and have control over these forces. Anything that does not happen in the daytime, such as trials or executions, are also held in Armagon which is part of the dream. It is also important to note that anything that happens in the dream, even death, can possibly happen in real life as well. "}
{"id": "29193_5", "pid": "29193_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the dream of townspeople?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The dream of Armagon connects all the townspeople. They all go there every night, every time they fall asleep. It\u2019s another reality with marble pillars, purple draperies, and a new hierarchical system in which Dawes is the king. This place has another set of rules and is as significant for people as their daily life. They value this dream and protect it from strangers, like Sol. It seems to be interconnected with reality because Vincent, who committed a crime in Armagon and got executed, also dies in real life, though from a heart attack. It interests Sol who tries to learn more but always faces passive aggression from those who are not eager to share the secrets of Armagon. At the end, he is being surrounded by the knights of Armagon and we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen to Sol later.  "}
{"id": "29193_5", "pid": "29193_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHenry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware\u2014beware of the Knights!\n \n\n\n  dream town\n \n\n by ... HENRY SLESAR\n \n\n\n\n  The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\n \n \n The\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n\"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n \n \"I'm sorry\u2014\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n \n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n\"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n \n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n \n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court\u2014\"\n \n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n \n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n\"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n \n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n \n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n \n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n \n \"I really can't thank you\n enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n \n \"The what?\"\n \n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n \n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n \n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\n \n \n \n He\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n \n Then he went to sleep.\n \n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n \n \"Are you nakkid ?\"\n \n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n \n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n \n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n \n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n \n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n\"What time is it?\"\n \n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n\"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n \n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n\"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n \n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n \n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n \n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n \n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n \n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n \n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n \n \"Huh?\"\n \n \" Sally! \" Mom again, sterner.\n\"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n \n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you ever gonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n \n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n\"Good morning.\"\n \n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n \n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n \n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n \n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n \n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n\"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n \n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n\"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n The man scratched his ear.\n\"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n \n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n \n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n\"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n \n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\n \n \n \n At\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n \n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He seemed okay.\"\n \n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n\"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n \n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n \n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n \n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n\"Don't you know nothin' ?\"\n \n \" Arma gon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister\u2014\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n\"What's the name?\"\n \n \"Becker.\"\n \n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n \n \"Dream? You mean this\u2014Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n \n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n \n \"You mean\u2014\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean you dream about the same\n place?\"\n \n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n \n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n \n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n \n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n \n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the least I\n could do.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n\"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n \n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n \n \"None of your business,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n \n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n \n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n \n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n \n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\n \n \n \n They\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n \n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n \n The man batted his eyes.\n\"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n\"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n\"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n \n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n \n \"Aw, Willie\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n \n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n\"Never seen you\n before. Night or day. Stranger?\"\n \n \"Come on !\" Dawes said.\n \n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n \n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n\"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n \n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n \n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n \n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n\"Does she dream about this\u2014Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n \n \"Yep.\"\n \n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n \n \"And you, Mr.\u2014\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n \n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n \n The fat man giggled.\n \n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n \n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n \n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n \n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n \n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n \n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n \n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\n \n \n \n The\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n \n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n \n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n \n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n \n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n \n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n \n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n \n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n \n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n \n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n\"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n \n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n\"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n \n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n \n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n \n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n \n \"Please ...\"\n \n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n \n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n \n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n \n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable\u2014\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n \n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n \n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n \n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n \n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n \n \"Heart attack.\"\n \n The fat man chuckled.\n \n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n \n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n\"About my car\u2014\"\n \n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n\"Your car ? Young man, ain't\n you got no respect ?\"\n \n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\n \n \n \n He\n took a walk.\n \n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n \n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n \n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n \n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n \n \"You a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Thought so.\"\n \n Sol repeated the question.\n \n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n \n \"How\u2014I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n \n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n \n That was that.\n \n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n \n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n \n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n \n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n \n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n \n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n \n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n \n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n \n He learned little.\n \n \n \n At\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n \n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n\"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n \n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n \n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n \n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n \n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n\"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n \n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n \n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n \n Inside the house, she said:\n\"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n \n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n \n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\n \n \n \n Mr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n \n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n \n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n\"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n \n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n \n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n \n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit\u2014it's\n sure interesting.\"\n \n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n\"I guess it would be.\"\n \n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n \n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n \n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n \n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n \n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n \n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n \n \"Goodnight.\"\n \n He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n \n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n \n Then sleep came.\n \n \n \n He\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n \n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n \n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n \n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n \n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n \n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n\"Gimme my hat!\"\n \n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n \n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n \n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!\"\n \n Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n \n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n\"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n \n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n\"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now you're in it, too.\"\n \n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n \n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So that's the\n snooper, eh?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n\"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n \n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n \n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n \n \"Now wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n Charlie shouted.\n \n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough\u2014\"\n \n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n \n The Knights stepped forward.\n \n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n \n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered\u2014would\n he ever awake?\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the dream of townspeople?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 23252, "query_start_index": 23254, "query_end_index": 23317, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The dream of the townspeople is Armagon, a palace with marble pillars supporting a high-domed ceiling. The wall is decorated with purple draperies, and the room is wide and long. Townspeople seem to be the Knights of the Realm in the palace, and the Dawes family appears to be the royal family. Every night, townspeople dream of going to this same palace, which confuses Sol Becker, an outsider who lost his car. Sol tries to find out what this dream place is throughout the story, but the townspeople do not tell him a lot. Sol learns on the first morning of his stay at the Dawes' house that there was an execution the night before, in which the executed person seems to be the owner of the barbershop, Mr. Brundage, who died of a heart attack. Sol questions around the town, where he learns little about the place. In the end, Sol also gets into the dream place, where he is about to be executed, too. The dream of the townspeople is a secret that the protagonist tries to find out throughout the story, but when he finally gets there, it seems that he may also lose the ability to live in the future."}
{"id": "51321_1", "pid": "51321_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27915, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "George Faircloth, a husband who has an eight-year marriage with Marge Faircloth, is unsatisfied with his wife as he thinks she is annoying and unbearable. He desires but cannot divorce her as the law and society are critical of the divorce. His colleague, Harry Folsom, suggests he get an illegal Ego Prime, a technology that can produce a human duplicate possessing all the human features and functions, after he becomes fed up with his wife after a fight over his new secretary. He goes to the black market, goes through all the examinations needed for the technology, and buys a Super Deluxe Prime, George Prime, to hide in his workshop in the garage. The workshop is his sanctuary that he keeps for years after a long fight with Marge, a place where Marge cannot go in. He sets up George Prime and orders it to pretend him whenever he goes out to have some extramarital affairs with women in his office. George Prime does an excellent job on that as it behaves completely identical to George Faircloth, except that it gives Marge Faircloth more pleasure than George Faircloth does. At first, George Faircloth enjoys the freedom of playing around with women and not having to worry about Marge\u2019s hysteria. But after a while, as he realizes that Marge has been more mellow and sweet whenever he is at home, catching George Prime on the street once when it is not supposed to be outside according to his order, he starts to suspect whether his choice is correct or not. One day, he leaves his date and comes home early, seeing George Prime have sexual affairs with Marge. Gripped by the anger, he tries to recall George Prime coming back to the garage, but it doesn\u2019t respond due to the lack of the first logical opportunity for it to return. After that, through the conversation with George Prime, he realizes that things are out of his control as he cannot decide specifically what George Prime will do. Even worse, he finds out that his money is spent through the signature of George Prime as their signatures both have legal effects, and that he cannot call the police to fix it as he couldn\u2019t explain the situation of illegal George Prime. George Prime and Marge Faircloth leave for Bermuda with his money. Marge comes home when he feels desperate in his house and comforts him. He soon realizes that it is not Marge Faircloth but Marge Prime, his wife\u2019s duplicate and that his wife had already found out his trick long before. In the end, George Faircloth lives happily with Marge Prime, and Marge Faircloth lives happily with George Prime. Both of them are satisfied with the duplicates as they would satisfy their needs in the marriage."}
{"id": "51321_1", "pid": "51321_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27915, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The main character is George Faircloth. He has been married to his wife, Marge, for eight years, and he is tired of her and their relationship. He describes her as emotional and grumpy. He also calls her jealous and brings up the story of when she fought with him because of his new female secretary. His friend Harry Folsom suggests  buying an Ego Prime - an android that fully resembles the person it was built after, including the feature of speech and mannerisms. The sale of this mechanism is heavily regulated by the law - having a personal Ego Prime with open circuits is illegal, but George feels desperate. He comes to a four-storied warehouse near Broadway meets a little man, a consultant who, after a quick chat, sends him to a laboratory where they can copy George\u2019s appearance and behavioral patterns. Two hours later, Faircloth meets his android duplicate George Prime, who later gets delivered and stored in the big closet in George's workshop - Marge never comes here. After supper, he switches on George Prime, lets him go to the house, and leaves for a date. During the following weeks George leaves at night after switching with his duplicate. He usually uses the android several days a week and puts him back in the workshop closet when he returns. Soon George realizes that his wife has become happier and calmer. George Prime claims that he was simply paying attention to her, listening - that\u2019s why she changed. George thanks him. The next evening, Faircloth unexpectedly meets the duplicate at the liquor store and becomes angry, but George Prime says that he had to get bourbon for Marge and was in no position to refuse. Faircloth decides to stay home the next night and has a strange conversation with his wife, after which he decides to go to bed. The next night, he activates George Prime and goes to the movies alone. Once back, Faircloth sees his wife and the duplicate kiss. He walks to the workshop and pushes the recall button waiting for the android to come, but George Prime appears only at dawn. The next morning, George gets a call from the bank and learns that someone who appeared to be him has been cashing checks for the last weeks, and now his account is empty. He calls one of the city travel agencies and learns that George Prime just bought two tickets to Bermuda. Apparently, Marge has spotted the substitution and convinced the android to purchase the tickets. George comes back home, but no one is there. Suddenly his wife opens the front door, her arms full of groceries. She tells him that she figured out everything but was not planning on running away with George Prime. She sent him back to the factory. George becomes suspicious and soon understands that it is a duplicate of Marge standing in front of him - his real wife did run away. \n"}
{"id": "51321_1", "pid": "51321_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27915, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows a couple, the Faircloths. It starts out with George being tired of his marriage, and he wants to find ways to enjoy his life more. The story is narrated in first person, so we get much better insight into George\u2019s thoughts. He describes his marriage as tiresome and draining, and says that he would have liked to divorce his wife a long time ago. He tries to flirt with different women, but his wife finds out and that just leads to more and more fighting. One day, one of his coworkers tells him about a new technology that allows him to buy a perfect robot replica of himself. George doubts buying the technology, because it is illegal, but then decides to do it. The robot he buys is a perfect replica of himself, and can be completely controlled by George. George uses the robot to stay at home with his wife while he goes out with different women. George is very happy with how his life is going, and he also starts to notice that his wife is much happier than before. Slowly, Prime George starts to defy George\u2019s orders until one day he realizes that Prime George bought two one-way tickets to Bermuda. George gets worried that his wife ran off with the android, but then she enters the house as if nothing happened and tells George that she wasn\u2019t going to run off with the android. When they embrace, George realizes that he was hugging an android replica of his wife, and he seems okay with that. "}
{"id": "51321_1", "pid": "51321_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27915, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story introduces Goerge Faircloth, husband to Marge Faircloth. The two live together and have been in a marriage for eight years. The story is told through George who explains that he has been desperate to find a way out of their marriage. He finds Marge complaining, whining too much and picking up on every little detail he does that does not go her way. Because of the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, divorce was never an option for them as taxes charged on it are too high.At work, George envies his co-worker, Harry Folsom, who is equally not in the happiest relationship but is allowed to gets away with traveling away from his wife. Marge is easily jealous. George has an affair with his new secretary, Jeree, which Marge finds out about and calls George out over dinner. The next morning, Harry advises George to get an \u201cEgo Prime,\u201d a clone android of one\u2019s self that looks and behaves just like the real person. This \u201cEgo Prime,\u201d however, seems to only be accessible to highly respected individuals with reputable titles. Harry recommends an agent from the black market to George. The agent recommends the Utility model but George wants the Super Deluxe Model. George\u2019s measurements are taken and after the whole process, gets to meet \u201cGeorge Prime.\u201d The android is delivered to George\u2019s home along with a remote. George has manipulated Marge beforehand as to not make her check upon the garage, which is where he plans to hide George Prime. The first week George Prime was put to use, George was barely at home, hanging out with not only Jeree but also other women. When he came back home ready for work, he would turn George Prime off and get to work. As time went on, George noticed something different: Marge became softer, nicer, cooking him dinner with music he likes. George Prime tells him he has just been telling her the right things. George Prime starts getting out of control as he makes his own decisions like going to the liquor store or spending intimate time with Marge overnight. George unexpectedly starts to crave Marge and cancels on his date. As he gets a call from the bank informing him about checks that were made to his account, he realizes Marge has known his tactic all along, and has been using the android to get what she wants, a trip to Bermuda. He finds no way out as calling the police would out get him into prison because of the prime being illegal. He comes back home to Marge, who expected would already be on the trip. She tells him she knew all along and realized she never fully appreciated the real him. From hugging her and feeling the depression button under her hair, he realizes Marge has also been using a Prime. He is, however, satisfied with her prime as she seems to do and say all the right things.\n"}
{"id": "51321_2", "pid": "51321_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the \u201cPrime\u201d technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27936, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Ego Prime is a technology that produces a robotic duplicate of a person. This duplicate is based on a neuro-pantograph with a humanlike body and soul. The duplicate is identical to a real person, including the habits, thought processes, physiological functions, or even the handwritten legal signature that one person may have. The only difference between the real person and one\u2019s duplicate is that the duplicate has a finger-depression button hidden underneath the hair above the ear. Throughout the story, George, a husband who has been tired of his wife, buys a George Prime, the duplicate of himself, to deal with his wife and have sexual affairs with other women around his office. However, he finds out that George Prime leaves with her wife, and his wife, Marge Faircloth, sends her duplicate Marge Prime to accompany her, just as he did to her. The exchange of their duplicates to escape from the unsatisfying marriage contributes to most of the story. Prime technology plays a significant role as duplicates can satisfy human needs better than a natural person. Due to this characteristic of being able to meet one\u2019s demand by their logical inferences and inability to feel annoyed, the duplicates of both sides become the ideal mates for each person, both George and Marge, ending the story with both of them living with the Primes. Without Prime Technology, the story would not have developed."}
{"id": "51321_2", "pid": "51321_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the \u201cPrime\u201d technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27936, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Prime technology allows George to spend evenings with his other romantic partners without maddening or upsetting his wife. He leaves his duplicate created with the Prime technology with her while spending his nights in other places. She is not supposed to notice the substitution, but eventually, George realizes that she did. She uses this knowledge to convince George Prime to buy two tickets to Bermuda. Apparently, she enjoys George Prime\u2019s company and feels happier with him than with her real husband. George, too, enjoys spending time with the duplicate of his wife at the end of the story, claiming that this android is a dream in comparison to all the other women he knows. The Prime technology practically ends the relationship between George and Marge but allows them to get better partners. "}
{"id": "51321_2", "pid": "51321_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the \u201cPrime\u201d technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27936, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The prime technology is one of the most important parts of the story. It allows George to get a break from a draining marriage. The technology allows people to make android replicas that can be completely controlled by their owners, and that is completely the same as the owner. George uses this technology to make a copy of himself that keeps his wife busy and happy. While the android is with his wife, he takes advantage to meet with many different women that he couldn\u2019t have met before. Slowly, the android starts to stretch George\u2019s commands, and George realizes that he has to turn the android off. Before he can do this, the android runs off with his wife. George realizes that his wife also had a prime replica. "}
{"id": "51321_2", "pid": "51321_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the \u201cPrime\u201d technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27936, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The \u201cPrime\u201d is a technology that allows an individual to create an android clone of themselves that looks and behaves like them. This can be used for many intentions, in this story\u2019s case, to get some time off a marriage that no longer brings joy to the parties involved. The technology is said to have been started by Hunyadi who invented the \u201cNeuro-pantograph.\u201d Larger technology enterprises then bought the model to modify and improve it further. The \u201cEgo Prime\u201d by \u201cEgo Prime, Inc.\u201d became so popular that the wives all over the country caught up with what the technology was and what its purpose was for. That is when black markets for the same technology started, which is where George gets his Prime. The Primes have different levels of model specificity ranging from the Utility model to the Super Deluxe model, which is the one George requests. The individual has to go through measurements and be under NP microprobes to create their Prime. The Prime produced has remote controls and has neurological pathways that are identical to its owner ingrained in them, allowing them to behave like the owner. All physicialities are identical except for finger-depression above the Prime\u2019s ear which if clicked, would end the android.\n"}
{"id": "51321_3", "pid": "51321_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of marriage explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27944, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts with a husband, George Faircloth, who is unsatisfied with his marriage, trying to escape from his wife without communicating with her. Throughout the story, he uses Prime Technology, a technology that can produce an identical duplicate of a human, to deal with his wife\u2019s complaints and other annoying interactions with him. However, when he finds out that George Prime, his duplicate, gets along better with his wife than him and finally leaves him behind together, he realizes what he has done wrong. When he feels desperate, his wife\u2019s duplicate comes to stay with him, and he finally finds his wife\u2019s duplicate better than his wife. The central theme of the story is the marriage relationship. The beginning of the story reveals a marriage failure where both the husband and the wife are not satisfied with each other after years-long marriage. Their solutions are not to communicate with each other or change for the better but to escape from each other through Prime technology. In the middle of the story, where George Faircloth once finds his wife adorable again due to George Prime\u2019s effort, it shows the importance of communication and mutual support in the marriage, which is lacking in their relationship. The ending of the story, where both of them live with the duplicates of each other, indicates that a good relationship in marriage is to listen to and satisfy what each other needs with proper communication."}
{"id": "51321_3", "pid": "51321_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of marriage explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27944, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "George Faircloth deems his marriage unhappy because it\u2019s permanent. He doesn\u2019t enjoy spending all his time with the same woman, even though he initially loved Marge. He is exhausted and theoretically would be happy to get a divorce. His despair leads to the events that follow his inner monologue. He buys an android that resembles him and activates him when he wants to meet a woman or simply leave the house for a bit. At the end, Marge and George Prime empty Faircloth\u2019s accounts and go to Bermuda. They are happy together. George himself enjoys living with Marge\u2019s android because she seems like a dream to him, a perfect woman. George and Marge both get too tired of their unhappy, imperfect marriage and choose ideal partners instead."}
{"id": "51321_3", "pid": "51321_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of marriage explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27944, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Marriage is depicted as an awful thing. George hates his marriage, but he can\u2019t end it because there are laws that would have allowed his wife to take a lot of his money. George says that he constantly fights with his wife, and that he finds it very hard to spend time with her due to her jealousy and other bad attributes. Marriage is depicted as something that people must do, but isn\u2019t taken seriously, as George very easily cheats on his wife with other women from the office. "}
{"id": "51321_3", "pid": "51321_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of marriage explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27944, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the central themes explored in \u201cPrime Difference\u201d is the concept of marriage. The story revolves around a couple, George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth, trapped in an eight year long unhappy marriage. Marge complains, whines and cries too much for George. Equally, George does not fulfill his potential in being a good, supportive husband either. After trying to fix it in every way possible, George is hopeless and gives in to the idea of getting an \u201cEgo Prime,\u201d a android clone of him that would look and act like him, allowing him to lead a joyful parallel life as the android directly deals with his wife.\n\nFirst, the story gives a social commentary on the concept of marriage. With the couple being trapped in such a long unhappy marriage, even after trying to fix it yet not finding any way out of it, the story showcases the unnatural aspect of marriage as a social construct. Two individuals are bound to live life together but yet are not able to get out of it because of an imaginary societal contract they agreed upon and societal norms that would view such action as dishonorable. Instead of finding other ways other than a divorce, which they could not afford, to fix it, they thus put up with living together unhappily. This leaves the reader questioning whether marriage should truly limit two individuals\u2019 freedom to this extent.\n\nThe story also gives a commentary on the nature of a good marriage. As the story goes on, George\u2019s Ego Prime starts to turn Marge into a softer, nicer woman, who George starts to appreciate more. George Prime gives credit to this change in behavior to his choice of saying the right things, in other words, the things Marge wants to hear. Equally, when George finds out the Marge he has been falling for again is merely a Prime too, he still accepts and wants her as she makes him feel appreciated. These intentions make the readers question the selfishness behind the concept of marriage. Do we agree to a marital contract purely for our own selfishness of wanting to be serviced and on some level, praised? Are the nice actions we do for our partners merely to selfishly receive those same actions back?\n"}
{"id": "51321_4", "pid": "51321_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27955, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth are husband and wife. They have married for 8 years. Their relationship is toxic and unsatisfying. George is fed up with Marge\u2019s constant complaints, grievance, and crying. Marge is unsatisfied with George\u2019s inattention to her and his possible affairs with women in his office, so she often spies on George\u2019s office life, which irritates George more. They are constantly in fight. Their way of communicating with each other is to attack and fight, and they haven\u2019t seen each other carefully and sweetly for a long time. Their relationship is to conquer and be conquered repeatedly, fighting all the time."}
{"id": "51321_4", "pid": "51321_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27955, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "George and Marge Faircloth have been married for eight years. George claims that their life is full of scandals and distrust. They fight ninety percent of the time. Marge is often complaining, crying, or criticizing George. She is jealous, and once when a new secretary started working with George, she threw a tantrum and spoiled the evening. Marge doesn\u2019t get enough attention from him and knows that he can be indecent. They both do not enjoy living together, and George finds it easy to buy the Prime android and spend his evenings with his female colleagues. At the end, Marge and George end up with the android duplicates of their spouse and feel much happier. "}
{"id": "51321_4", "pid": "51321_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27955, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between George and Marge is very tense. It seems as if in the past they had a great relationship, but now they just fight. George states that they fight almost every night, and that it is very hard for them to spend time together without there being something that Marge complains about. It is also clear that George doesn\u2019t try to make Marge happy anymore. Both of them quit the relationship and instead bought prime androids so that they could have more freedom outside of the marriage. "}
{"id": "51321_4", "pid": "51321_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27955, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth are a couple that have been engaged for eight years. They are trapped in an unhappy marriage where George feels trapped by a wife, who although he finds stunning, does not stop complaining, crying and whining about the most unnecessary issues of their coupled life. The two have tried to make the marriage better but never yet succeeded. They were never able to consider divorce as an option because the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968 charges incredibly high taxes on the process. Marge is also a jealous wife which makes George feel even more suffocated. Marge finds out that George has an affair with his secretary, Jeree. In the story, George finds a solution to this unhappy marriage by purchasing an Ego Prime, an android clone of himself that looks and behaves like him, so that he can go on about his life as the android deals with the coupled life for him. In the first stage, this android brings him lots of joy as he is able to meet with his secretary and other women as he pleases. Then, as he notices that his wife gets more tender and more caring, he starts appreciating and missing her more. By the end of the story, he finds out that Marge knew his trick all along and that she booked herself a trip to Bermuda with his money. Marge also had a Prime of herself, who is the real person George has in fact fallen for.\n"}
{"id": "51321_5", "pid": "51321_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Harry Folsom and what role does he play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27945, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry Folsom is a colleague of George Faircloth, a husband fed up with his wife. He also has a wife who is unbearable to him, but he gets the chance to escape from her once in a while. In addition, he has a friend who knows how to get the Ego Prime, a technology to produce duplicate people from natural human beings, from the black market. Harry is the person who inspires and provides the resource for George to get an illegal Ego Prime, which contributes to the whole story."}
{"id": "51321_5", "pid": "51321_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Harry Folsom and what role does he play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27945, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry Folsom is George\u2019s colleague and friend. They work at the same office. George is envious of him because Folsom can leave his wife and go to Rio from time to time, and George doesn't have this opportunity. Harry is also the person who mentions purchasing the Ego Prime when he talks with George. During this conversation, he explains that getting the android is not very expensive and can solve all the family issues George has. Harry also gives him the contact details of a man from whom George can buy the deluxe model with open circuits. "}
{"id": "51321_5", "pid": "51321_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Harry Folsom and what role does he play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27945, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry Folsom is one of George\u2019s friends and coworkers. After George complains to him about the state of his marriage, Harry is the one that offers George the solution of getting a prime android replica of himself. George seems to be jealous of Harry because Harry once in a while goes out with different women without his wife finding out. Harry helped George get the prime replica, as Harry knew people that sold them. Basically, it was Harry who steered George into buying the android and lying to his wife. "}
{"id": "51321_5", "pid": "51321_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nPRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems\u2014but which one would I be?\n \n\n \n I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n \n Understand now\u2014I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge\u2014\n \n It's so permanent .\n \n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties\u2014but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n \n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n \n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n \n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering\u2014but that was where the dream stopped.\n \n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\n \n \n\n \n Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n \n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week.\n \n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along.\n \n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work\u2014just to sit there.\n \n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n \n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n \n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n \n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n \n Marge had quite a spy system.\n \n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n \n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n \n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n \n Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning.\n\"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n \n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's\u2014it's indecent.\"\n \n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy\u2014\"\n \n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n \n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n \n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n \n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\n \n \n\n \n It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n \n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances.\n \n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n \n But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done.\n \n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway.\n \n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you.\"\n \n \n\n \n I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a\u2014\"\n \n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often come to us to avoid the\u2014ah\u2014unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves\u2014\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n \n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models.\n \n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for\u2014ah\u2014close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences\u2014\"\n \n I was shaking my head. \"I want a Super Deluxe model,\" I told him.\n \n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be\u2014awkward, shall we say. Very awkward\u2014\"\n \n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n \n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n \n The blanks weren't very impressive\u2014clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough\u2014embarrassingly thorough, in fact\u2014but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n \n And that was all there was to it.\n \n \n\n \n Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n \n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face.\n \n \n\n \n \"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother.\n \n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it.\n \n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n \n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n \n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did.\n \n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court.\n \n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too.\n \n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.\n \n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears.\n \n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n \n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win.\n \n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\n \n \n\n \n At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop.\n \n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack\u2014upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it.\n \n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n \n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable.\n \n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n \n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n \n Eventually.\n \n If you're really persistent.\n \n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n \n After supper, I went out to the workshop\u2014to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n \n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n \n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house.\n \n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n \n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown.\n \n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n \n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car.\n \n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\n \n \n\n \n Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n \n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time\u2014he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet.\n \n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn to like her after a bit.\"\n \n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n \n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n \n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over.\"\n \n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n \n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n \n So I did.\n \n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful.\n \n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n \n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office.\n \n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program.\n \n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n\"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n \n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office\u2014there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n \n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\n \n \n\n \n Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first\u2014I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n \n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime.\n \n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much.\n \n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it.\n \n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again\u2014really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint.\n \n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing.\n \n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop.\n \n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n \n \"There must be something .\"\n \n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references.\"\n \n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n \n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much.\n \n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n \n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n \n \"Of course, George.\"\n \n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n \n \"Thank you, George.\"\n \n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\n \n \n\n \n The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \" What are you doing out on the street? \"\n \n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n \n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises\u2014\"\n \n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n \n \"Well, certainly not\u2014\"\n \n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious.\"\n \n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n \n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I don't want it to happen again.\"\n \n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control\u2014I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting\u2014but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job.\n \n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire.\n \n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume.\n \n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n \n \"Uh?\"\n \n \"Do you still love me?\"\n \n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I still\u2014\"\n \n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n \n \"Mm. I guess I've\u2014uh\u2014got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that perfume!\n \n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n \n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep\u2014\"\n \n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n \n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n \n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows.\n \n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off.\n \n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\n \n \n\n \n I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n \n George Prime didn't come out.\n \n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover.\n \n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done.\n \n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him.\n \n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced.\n \n \"What check?\" I asked.\n \n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday\u2014five hundred dollars\u2014against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n \n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n \n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n \n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them.\n \n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n \n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n \n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n \n I came up with a horrible thought.\n \n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n \n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda.\"\n \n \"When?\" I choked out.\n \n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n \n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control\u2014 way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon\u2014\n \n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime.\n  For how long?\n \n \n \n\n \n When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n \n They were gone.\n \n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android.\n \n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around.\n \n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n \n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n \n It was indecent.\n \n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n \n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n \n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n \n \"But I thought\u2014I mean the ticket office\u2014\"\n \n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n \n \"Then\u2014you knew?\"\n \n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n \n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n \n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest.\n \n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before....\"\n \n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what did you do with him?\"\n \n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n \n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this\u2014\n \n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened.\n \n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n \n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\n \n \n\n \n Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all.\n \n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison.\n \n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n \n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n \n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Harry Folsom and what role does he play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27873, "query_start_index": 27875, "query_end_index": 27945, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry Folsom is George Faircloth\u2019s co-worker who works at the same office. He is the individual who shows him the possibility of freedom from his wife and the actions to take to make it happen. In his unhappy marriage, George has always been envious of men like Harry. Harry\u2019s wife is equally not easy to deal with but the difference was he would always get away with leaving to Rio every now and then with a stenographer. He plays an important role when Harry comes to him for advice the day after Marge finds out about Harry\u2019s secretary, Jeree, and their affair. Over coffee the next morning, Harry is the person who jokingly suggests George to get an Ego Prime, selling him the idea of freedom from a wife, to which George initially declines because of how it is illegal. Still saying that he is joking, Harry confirms that with the right contact, George could get one of those androids at a decent price. After successfully convincing George, Harry recommends one of his contacts to him. Following his advice, George finds himself meeting an agent with a mustache from the black market for Primes, who from then took on the responsibility to create George\u2019s Prime. Without Harry\u2019s lifestyle and recommendations in the story, George may not have chosen to go on with creating his Prime.\n"}
{"id": "51398_1", "pid": "51398_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32100, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kaiser is a young man who was unhappily married and decided to join space service to escape his wife and her brother. He was on the mothership, Soscites II, that was finishing its planet-mapping tour. The team put him in a scout ship and sent him to the planet he calls Big Muddy. During the landing, the scout\u2019s bottom bent inward and flattened the fuel tube. At some point, Kaiser finds himself lost because he doesn\u2019t remember what was happening in the last hours, only the fact that he must fix the scout during the next few weeks. He reads the message tape with the mothership and learns that he had a swollen arm, a fever, periods of blankness, and in the middle of the exchange, he started using baby-talk. Now Kaiser feels better and asks for some information on fixing the scout from the mothership\u2019s team. Then, he walks around the scout, looks at the \u201coctopus\u201d testing the environment of Big Muddy, and heads toward a sluggish river and native seal-people. They are short, with the body of a seal, thick arms, and thumbless hands, and have mammalian characteristics. The man spends some time observing them and then looks at their domed buildings. Soon the mothership informs Kaiser that he has probably been invaded by a symbiote, though it is not supposed to harm him. It\u2019s adaptable and tried to give Kaiser what he emotionally desired. Hours later, the team adds that the symbiote can accurately gauge his feelings, and he needs to test this. Kaiser makes a shallow cut - it immediately heels, his sensory perception improves, and now he can control how humidity affects him. He spends a day trying to repair the scout and then leaves for a day walking trip. He meets another group of seal-people. They seem more advanced than the first ones. Kaiser sleeps in a tent and, in the morning, swims with the natives until one of them starts playfully drowning him. He comes back to his ship and realizes that his physical strength has improved. Kaiser manages to partially fix the metal bottom and report the events of the day to the mothership. They tell him that the natives probably have the symbiote and then order him to repair the ship as soon as possible. In the morning, they repeat that he needs to leave very soon, which puzzles Kaiser. The captain sends an angry message with the order to finish repairing the scout. Kaiser goes to the river and takes the communicator with him. The natives look almost human-like now and use syllabism. A female native invites him to the river, but Kaiser hears that the communicator received a message. He walks back and reads that the team has a suspicion the symbiote can alter Kaiser\u2019s mind. The second group of seal-people was not more advanced - he just became more like them. The man destroys the communicator and follows the girl to the river. "}
{"id": "51398_1", "pid": "51398_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32100, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kaiser is busy trying to figure out the strange communication from the tape in his hand, but he is also annoyed by the rainy climate outside. He tries to think back to the baby talk but finds it hard to even remember what he was doing here. Kaiser knows that he has to repair the scout ship, or else he will be stuck here forever. The mothership, Soscites II, has set itself into orbit around the Big Muddy ship, which is why he only has a month to repair the ship. The message he sends from himself is about the seal-people and repairing the scout ship, and the ship responds with a message about how this information has been given to Sam. He responds with a list of his symptoms, and the ship asks for more information. Kaiser wonders why some of his messages are sending in baby talk, but the ship says that everything is perfectly legible. However, after the last message, he does feel better and sends another one to the ship for more information. Kaiser dreams about his wife Helene and their loveless marriage, waking up in a cold sweat an hour later. He decides to go outside, observing how the octopus part of the scout ship is busy sending everything to the mothership. Kaiser goes to visit the seal-people again, and they chirp when he comes close. Some of the seal-people come up to him, but the smell of fish is too much for him to bear. He finds that they are a mindless lot and decides to explore the round domes. For the rest of the day, Kaiser tries to figure out how to fix his scout ship because the Soscites II sent little to no help. The ship tells him that he has been invaded by a symbiote, but it is not dangerous because the symbiote will die with Kaiser if he dies. It also explains the baby talk, as the symbiote was trying to give him what it thought he needed. It is revealed the crew does not like him much because he is intelligent and not prone to mistakes. Later, he accepts that he will live with the symbiote and goes to observe the seal-people again. This new group seems more advanced than the other, and they even give him seaweed as a gesture of friendship. Kaiser goes to swim the next day, and the locals are extremely friendly as they try to play with him in the water. When he goes back to his ship, he finds equipment and begins to put work into repairing the scout. The mothership sends him messages to come back, but they deliberately conceal information.  He also finds out that the seal-people are becoming more human like now, and a female even stays to watch him repair. During his last communication with the ship, he smashes the communicator and joins the female as they run to the river bank to play. "}
{"id": "51398_1", "pid": "51398_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32100, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows Kaiser in his scout ship as he is grounded upon Big Muddy. He is temporarily separated from his mother ship, Soscites II, as the mothership takes an orbit around the planet. Kaiser is grounded because his scout is broken, and he does not have the appropriate equipment to fix it. \n\nIn his communications log with the mother ship, it is revealed that Kaiser had fallen ill.  After he recovered, he took a trip to observe the seal-people. They had been swimming and eating by the river bank and paused in curiosity as Kaiser approached.  Alongside the riverbank lay a few hundred dwellings - round domes built with mud bricks. \n\nUpon receiving more information from the ship, Kaiser and the crew find out that the symbiote is harmless to humans. Any of his prior illnesses was perhaps the symbiote adjusting his body to the new environment and correcting any subsequent mistakes it may have made. In addition, the symbiote can only know what Kaiser wants by reading his mind. At this theory, the crew urged Kaiser to perform his own tests to see if it was true. He tested this theory by changing his body temperature and checking that the room temperature stayed the same, and confirmed it to be true. \n\nKaiser then took another trip,  hoping to find more intelligent natives. He found a group of seal-people that seemed more intelligence in their actions and has less of an odor to them. The next morning, he went swimming with the seal-people and they crowded around him in a friendly manner. However, their overeagerness to play nearly caused Kaiser to drown, and so he headed back to the scout. There, he accidentally turned a sled and found the equipment. He was able to concentrate and fix part of the scout using his mind and tools. As he sent off the news to the ship, he read his messages. \n\nIt appears that Big Muddy undergoes two drastic seasonal changes - extreme moisture and aridity. As a result, the seal-people must be able to physically adapt in order to survive. SS II informs Kaiser that it is due to the natives also having symbiosis, and that all efforts should be devoted to fixing the scout and returning home. Though noting the urgency behind the messages, Kaiser still chose to take another trip to the river banks. This time, he noticed that the seal-people looked almost human and he could detect syllabism in their speech. \n\nIn a frantic last message from the ship, Kaiser learned that the symbiotes have already begun altering Kaiser in more sinister ways. His perceptions on finding seal-peole becoming more intelligent and human-like wasn't actually because of that, but because he himself was becoming more seal-like. The symbiote is able to alter his mind and physical state, and already has. After reading the message, Kaiser picked up a rock to destroy the device, and happily returned to the girl on river bank and they swam in the water. "}
{"id": "51398_1", "pid": "51398_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32100, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows Kaiser, a human who gets stranded on a new planet. He is a part of a space expedition, and after his ship crash lands he only has one month to fix his scout ship and return to the large ship. He can communicate with the large ship using a typing system, and it is revealed that he has been communicating with the crew because he had been feeling sick. Kaiser also interacted with the natives of the planet, which are described to be seal-people. The ship\u2019s doctor informed Kaiser that his symptoms most likely come from a symbiote which inhabited his body, but that there is no reason for concern, as the symbiotic relationship can help both the symbiote and Kaiser. Kaiser struggled with this news for a while, but then realized that it could be a good thing. The symbiote allowed Kaiser to control his feelings better, and even helped him physically. Kaiser then went on a journey to a new village of the natives in order to search for tools that could help him repair the ship. Here, he interacted very well with the natives, and felt happy doing so. After coming back, he realized that the symbiote was giving him extra strength and managed to repair the ship. When the ship told him to immediately come back, he started to doubt his desire to go back. He went back to the original village of the seal-people, taking with him a transportable communication device. He seemed to be very happy with the seal-people, having fun and interacting with females. The ship sent him a message telling him that there is a lot of urgency in his order for Kaiser to go up, as the symbiote was adapting his body and mind to the planet. Kaiser responded to this message by breaking the communication device and going back to the river with the seal-people. "}
{"id": "51398_2", "pid": "51398_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32104, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kaiser left Earth on a mothership Soscites II, that soon, finishing its planet-mapping tour, approached a planet that the man named Big Muddy. He left the spacecraft in a small scout ship - which had a pilot chair, a communicator, and a bunk - and landed on the muddy surface. The other seven scouts got lost during the previous exploration of new worlds. It is wet, humid, and warm on Big muddy, constantly raining with different intensity. There is a wide sluggish river, which has the shape of a horseshoe, two hundred yards away from the scout and also a chain of hills. Farther, along the stream, there is a group of several hundred domed dwellings, built of mud blocks, packed with river weed and sand. Another group of seal-people lives near the riverbank in the opposite direction of Kaiser's first observational walk. "}
{"id": "51398_2", "pid": "51398_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32104, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on a planet that Kaiser has named the Big Muddy. It is extremely wet, warm, and humid. There is also a village of seal-people nearby, and they have huts alongside the river bank. Kaiser\u2019s scout ship has places for controls and also to sleep. In the village, there are also round domes that were based on construction of a series of four arches in a circle. The climate also changes on the planet, which is why the seal-people change as time goes on. Although it rains a lot in general, there are seasons where it rains less than the others. This is evident because the domes are built by river weed, mud, and sand. Even though the seal-people do not know how to use fire, it is evident that there must be times where it rains less in order for them to build these domes. "}
{"id": "51398_2", "pid": "51398_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32104, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes placed on Big Muddy. The current climate on this planet when Kaiser arrives is wet, humid and warm - and constantly raining. The landscape includes many river banks where the natives spend time, and the ground is often muddy and slippery. \n\nAlongside the riverbank, there are also two hundred dwellings. These dwellings - round domes - are constructed from bricks built from a dried combination of mud, river weed, and sand. The dome was built by constructing four arches ranging in a circle, with the roof forming the final layer. \n\n"}
{"id": "51398_2", "pid": "51398_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32104, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on a planet in which there is little human presence. After Kaiser crashes on this planet, he is stuck on a small metal ship trying to fix it. The planet is described to be very rainy and humid, but it is also mentioned that the planet constantly changes weather. The weather can vary from very rainy and humid to very arid and sunny. The planet is inhabited by native seal-people. These natives live in settlements around the bank of a curling river, in small huts made from mud. The planet is also mentioned to have large foothills around the river. \n"}
{"id": "51398_3", "pid": "51398_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the seal-people in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32125, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kaiser\u2019s perception of the native groups of seal-people represents how his body is affected by the symbiote that has invaded his system. The first time the man sees them, he considers them mindless repulsive creatures with an unbearable odor and no proper communication system. The second meeting changes his opinion about them - now they seem more advanced in their demeanor and actions, friendlier, and their smell is less repugnant. This change in perception shows that Kaiser has already started changing, becoming more like them. The last meeting with the seal-people makes the man believe that they have more individualistic characteristics. They don\u2019t have the bad odor anymore, just a pleasant scent. They use distinct syllabism, and, finally, living with them and swimming in the river seems more appealing to him than going back to the Soscites II. These seal-people have the same symbiote, which has altered their appearance and mind. At the end, Kaiser practically becomes one of them. "}
{"id": "51398_3", "pid": "51398_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the seal-people in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32125, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The seal-people are the only other signs of life that Kaiser interacts with in the story. Although they are not very intelligent, they are friendly and somewhat harmless. Since Kaiser is trapped anyways, he usually finds time to go visit the seal-people and see any developments in the village. The seal-people are also important because they are infected with the symbiote that Kaiser becomes affected by, changing their appearances to better suit the climate changes that happen on the Big Muddy. As Kaiser spends more time with them, he realizes that they are not as bad as he thinks they are because they can change themselves. As Kaiser eventually chooses to abandon communication with the mother ship and join the seal-people, they have almost become his new family in a sense. "}
{"id": "51398_3", "pid": "51398_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the seal-people in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32125, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The native seal-creatures in the story are important because their very existence unlocks a lot of answers that both Kaiser and those aboard the SS II seek. For one, Big Muddy is said to undergo extreme weather cycle changes between the spring and fall seasons, for which the natives are only able to survive through because of their adaptability. This adaptability is only possible due to the symbiotes that have invaded Kaiser, allowing them such physical change. \n\nThis alludes to what is happening to Kaiser. On his second and third explorations, he supposedly finds seal-people that have become more human-like and intelligence. As we now know by learning about the seal-people, it was less so about the seals being more intelligence but Kaiser becoming more seal-like through this symbiote enacting the physical change. \n"}
{"id": "51398_3", "pid": "51398_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the seal-people in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32125, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The seal-people are the native settlers of the planet in which Kaiser crashes. They are described to be half-seal and half-human. They have short hands with 3 fingers, and fin-like feet that allow them to walk on land. They are also very furry, with their color varying. At the beginning of the story, they are described as being unintelligent but friendly. After Kaiser visits a new village, they begin to be more intelligent and Kaiser can communicate with them better. At the end, Kaiser enjoys spending time with them and is showing signs of becoming one of them. \n"}
{"id": "51398_4", "pid": "51398_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the communication device in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32134, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The communicator allows Kaiser to receive messages from the mothership and its team. It\u2019s the only mechanism that connects him to other intelligent human beings. Throughout the story, these messages help him understand why he had a fever, swelling, a brief period of blankness, and why he used baby-talk. Using the communication device, the mothership\u2019s team and scientists explain to Kaiser what kind of symbiote lives in his body and how it can gauge his emotional reactions and adapt to various environmental and mental triggers. They manage to ask Keiser to test their theory and later inform him of their findings regarding the planet's climate. They use the tape to order Kaiser to return as soon as possible and finally tell him that the symbiote is probably changing his mind and turning him into someone equal in intelligence to the seal-people. "}
{"id": "51398_4", "pid": "51398_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the communication device in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32134, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The communication device is what lets Kaiser continue communicating with the mother ship. Without it, he would not have been able to form any form of communication and try to find a solution to his problem. Although the mothership is not helpful in terms of helping him repair the scout ship, he does report to them his symptoms of illness. He gets all of his instructions from them, and they are the ones to diagnose him of having a symbiote in his body. The communication device ties Kaiser to his mission, and he would not be able to receive instructions for the next step if he did not have the communication device. At the end of the story, however, Kaiser sees the communication device as a hindrance because he has no close friends in the crew anyways. He destroys, finally setting himself free from the mothership. "}
{"id": "51398_4", "pid": "51398_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the communication device in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32134, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The communication device is the only linkage Kaiser has to his crewmates aboard the SS II, and it is the only way Kaiser is able to get verified information (i.e. about his sickness, then later, the seal-creatures). It emphasizes the distance between Kaiser and everybody else. \n\nIt builds tension in the story as communications only come after a period of delivery time. In addition, the messages that come through are often unfinished in the sense that not the full truth of information is provided. "}
{"id": "51398_4", "pid": "51398_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the communication device in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32134, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The communication device is the only form of communication that Kaiser has with his crew in the large ship. Kaiser was feeling very sick at the beginning of the story, even forgetting parts of what he did. This communication system allowed him to communicate with the ship\u2019s doctor and understand what was going on with him. The communication also allowed Kaiser to understand the implications of his new symbiote. In the end, the communications that the crew sent Kaiser showed the negative effects of the symbiote, and how it would slowly turn Kaiser into a seal-person. "}
{"id": "51398_5", "pid": "51398_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the baby talk in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32123, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The fact that Kaiser at some point uses baby-talk helps Sam and other members of the Soscites II team determine what exactly caused Kaiser\u2019s symptoms and how it can analyze his emotions and use them to give his body what it needs. The main reason why the man uses baby-talk seems to be that he was most happy in his childhood which also underscores his alienation from people, that he is a loner. Kaiser went to space to run away from his wife and her brother, his colleagues respect him but do not like him, and none of them is Kaiser\u2019s friend. He\u2019s naturally unsociable and was happier when he was a kid. "}
{"id": "51398_5", "pid": "51398_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the baby talk in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32123, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The baby talk that Kaiser experiences is important because it is the effect of the symbiote being in his body. Without the baby talk, the ship would not have accurately determined that there is a symbiote in his body. It also sets off the story, because Kaiser would otherwise believe that he is perfectly fine on the planet. Although he is confused by the baby talk, he does realize that it disappears later. It is an effect of the symbiote, trying to bring him back to a happier time in his life which was childhood. Without the baby talk, it would have been impossible for Kaiser and the rest of the ship to realize the symbiote. It also later directly affects how Kaiser makes the choices regarding the seal-people and how he eventually destroys the communication device to join them. "}
{"id": "51398_5", "pid": "51398_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the baby talk in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32123, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The baby talk is important because it is a clear sign of the symbiote having entered Kaiser's system and adapting him. His other symptoms like changing color or having trouble keeping food down could have been reasoned to a flu or virus, so the baby talk symptom was an important distinction for the doctor and those aboard SS II to identify what was going on. \n\nAdditionally, the reason behind the baby talk appearing hinted at why Kaiser may have more easily given into staying on Big Muddy and transforming into the seal-life creatures. Sam had said the symbiote instilled baby talk back into Kaiser because it believed that Ksier was most happy when he was a child - and wanted to provide Kaiser with this happy state of mind. This, along with Kaiser's feeling lonely and tormented aboard the SS and on Earth respectively, makes sense why Kaiser might choose another way of life for himself and his happiness. "}
{"id": "51398_5", "pid": "51398_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nWell, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was\u2014\n \n \n GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\n \n \n By CHARLES V. DE VET\n \n Illustrated by TURPIN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?\n \n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n \n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?\"\n \n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?\n \n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone\u2014or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.\n \n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:\n \n The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship\u2014the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds\u2014and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n \n The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n \n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.\n \n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.\n \n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....\n \n \n\n \n One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages\u2014both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.\n \n The first was from himself:\n \n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n \n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.\n \n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.\n \n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:\n \n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The ship's next message read:\n \n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\n \n \n SS II\n \n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n \n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n \n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\n \n \n SS II\n \n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n \n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n \n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape\u2014the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.\n \n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.\n \n \n SS II\n \n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n \n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n \n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n \n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness\u2014he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n \n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n \n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n \n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.\n \n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n \n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n \n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n \n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\n \n \n\n \n One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting\u2014or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.\n \n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n \n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.\n \n \n\n \n They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.\n \n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n \n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.\n \n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.\n \n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.\n \n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.\n \n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n \n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank\u2014and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n \n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.\n \n The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.\n \n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\n \n \n\n \n Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar\u2014the best leverage he had on hand\u2014but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.\n \n That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:\n \n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE\u2014SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\n \n \n SOSCITES II\n \n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n \n WHAT THE HELL?\n \n SMOKY\n  Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:\n \n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.\n \n \n J. G. ZARWELL\n \n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours\u2014until the next communication came in:\n \n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n \n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n \n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n \n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n \n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized\u2014and fell instantly asleep.\n \n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n \n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n \n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n \n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n \n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\n \n \n SS II\n \n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.\n \n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops\u2014and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.\n \n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n \n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!\n \n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n \n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.\n \n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n102, humidity 113\u2014just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.\n \n \n\n \n During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n \n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately\u2014and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.\n \n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :\n \n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\n \n \n SMOKY\n \n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n \n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey\u2014in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.\n \n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n \n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.\n \n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.\n \n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n \n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\n \n \n\n \n As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.\n \n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.\n \n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n \n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam\u2014they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency\u2014and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.\n \n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.\n \n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.\n \n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n \n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here\u2014if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them\u2014and he packed and started back to the scout.\n \n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n \n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.\n \n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.\n \n \n\n \n Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n \n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly\u2014but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.\n \n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly\u2014until the fuel pump hung free!\n \n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n \n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.\n \n The first was quite routine:\n \n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n \n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.\n \n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.\n \n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.\n \n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n \n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\n \n \n SS II\n \n \n\n \n Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency\u2014there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.\n \n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.\n \n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.\n \n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:\n \n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\n \n \n H. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n \n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal\u2014which he had been eating with his fingers\u2014into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n \n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.\n \n \n\n \n The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.\n \n And they were almost human!\n \n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup\u2014that was little changed from the first he had found\u2014as in their obviously greater intelligence.\n \n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor\u2014only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n \n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n \n One was a female.\n \n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.\n \n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\n \n \n\n \n Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:\n \n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n \n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n \n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU\u2014TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n \n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW\u2014WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE\u2014IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n \n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\n \n \n SS II\n \n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n \n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.\n \n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the baby talk in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 32058, "query_start_index": 32060, "query_end_index": 32123, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The baby talk is one of the symptoms that Kaiser shows at the beginning of the story. While communicating with the ship, he sent the ship weird messages. These messages replicated how babies talk. The ship\u2019s doctor told Kaiser that it was a symptom of the symbiote entering Kaiser\u2019s body, and that the baby talk could be explained. The symbiote wanted Kaiser to feel happy, and it believed that Kaiser had been most happy when he was a baby, so the symbiote tried to replicate those feelings. Overall, the baby talk was the initial sign of the control that the symbiote would have over Kaiser and his body, eventually leading to Kaiser slowly turning into a seal-person."}
{"id": "61171_1", "pid": "61171_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30465, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A racketeer, Tony Carmen, comes to Professor Venetti, demanding him figure out how to get rid of the corpse in his house without leaving any traces by using the information Professor Venetti has in his job for the U.S. government that is related to the disposal problem of nuclear waste. Tony threatens Professor Venetti that if Professor Venetti does not abide by what he says, his connection with Mafia will cause Professor Venetti a lot of trouble. Afraid of what the Mafia may do, Professor Venetti finally accepts his request. However, professor Venetti does not abide by the safety and careful principles when he invents the machine, which is named Expendable late after by Tony. He does not know how the machine works either; he creates a device that can turn physical mass into nothingness without knowing where the disposed of mass or energy goes. When he gives the machine to Tony, Tony asks how the machine works, but Professor Venetti cannot explain. Later on, Tony sets up the device on the street, ordering Professor Venetti to turn on the machine, which is modified by a boy who used to be a mechanic, and Professor Venetti does. The machine destroys a warehouse, including the people inside. Professor Venetti condemns Tony for committing a crime, but Tony does not care as there is no corpse to prove the crime. \n\nTony persuades Professor Venetti to put the Expendables into business. He leaks the information about the machine through newspapers to attract big corporations to come for them. As they make more profits from the product and go through all the business matters, an agent from Atomic Energy Commission comes. The agent informs them about the ban of their products because there is a research finding that the side effect of their product is the heat transformed from the mass, which results in the rising temperature. Professor Venetti believes that people would not stop using the products even if they knew what environmental damage they would cause. He creates a reverse version of the machine, called Disexpendable, which would consume the excess energy produced by the Expendables. After he completes it, he turns it on. As the Disexpendable operates, the temperature gets colder, and the corpse, once decomposed, appears in the room in front of the agent. At the same time, Tony orders Professor Venetti to turn off the machine.\n"}
{"id": "61171_1", "pid": "61171_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30465, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tony Carmen, a criminal with connections in the Mafia, comes to professor Venetti with a request to create some method of getting rid of human corpses with no traces. He says that these are bodies of accident victims left by Harry Keno. Professor tries to come up with different conventional methods. Carmen mentions that he knows Venetti\u2019s affiliation with the radioactive waste disposal program coordinated by the government and wants something more scientifically-based. Venetti thinks about all the attempts the government made to dispose of radioactive waste, but they were all futile since there was no way of creating an effective mechanism without breaking the law of energy conservation. He experiments and manages to create a machine that erases any physical object without any thermal or gravitational traces. When Tony Carmen asks where the matter goes, the professor honestly admits that he doesn\u2019t know. Carmen is suspicious, but Venetti firmly states that even if the objects go to the future or the past, there is a small chance of them appearing again soon. Tony starts talking about the mass-production of these machines, but Venetti initially protests, scared of legal prosecution and reputational damage. But eventually, the professor gives up, realizing that this mechanism  - Tony calls it an Expendable - won\u2019t be useful to the government. Sometime later, Camren and Venetti decide to test the machine outside. After flipping the switch, Venetti sees that a distant warehouse building disappears. He is shocked and soon notices that the unit is halved. Tony says that his friend separated the mechanism to square the operational field, and it worked. He also says that his enemy Harry Keno just got wiped out together with his intimates and their confidential squat. The following morning, the Times mentions the vanishing of the building and that the government is developing a disintegrating process for waste. Tony comes to him and tells him that Arcivox - a company producing radios and TV sets - wants to buy the machine. Tony suggests selling the potent and keeping it in control through a separate corporation. Several months later, professor Venetti is in his office talking to his secretary, Miss Brown, about the future business communications. Suddenly Tony bangs open the door and says that G-men are on their way. Seconds later, an investigator from the Atomic Energy Commission comes in. He quickly states that the manufacturing of the Expendable will soon be banned. He explains that their scientists understood that the energy the machine seemingly destroyed actually turned into heat. This process increased the mean temperature. The professor agrees but adds that people are too stubborn to stop using the machine. He suggests creating an engine that would use up this extra energy. When they switch the disexpendable on, slowly the body of Harry Keno appears on the revolving disc. At the end, Venetti claims that his inventions are useless now and that this story is true, and he encourages the readers to write letters towards his upcoming defense."}
{"id": "61171_1", "pid": "61171_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30465, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows a scientist who works for the U.S. Government. He is trying to find ways that the Government can get rid of radioactive and nuclear waste cleanly and safely. He is approached by a member of the Italian Mob. He asks Venetti to continue making this instrument, and to give him a copy when he makes it, because he needs to find a way to get rid of human bodies. At the beginning Venetti doubts doing this, but he believes it is a good way to make money. Venetti finally makes it and it, and gives Venetti one of the machines. The machine seems to get rid of anything that is put in it, without leaving behind any trace. Together, they start a company and commercially sell the boxes as expendables. They start to gain a lot of money, because it makes life easier for a lot of people. Their company grows a lot, and they start to get a lot of. Finally, it is revealed that the expendables have been contributing to global warming, as it excretes the energy into the environment. Venetti develops another machine in order to counteract the effects of the original expendable, which leads to regenerating everything that was put in the machine, including the dead bodies. This leads to Venetti being sued for the expendables, as people believe that he approached the member of the mob first. "}
{"id": "61171_1", "pid": "61171_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30465, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Expendables is written in the form of a personal account by scientist Professor Venetti. He is approached by a stranger claiming to know the Mafia, Tony Carmen, who asks him for a favor to which Venetti initially refuses. Carmen is trying to use the professor\u2019s potential invention to get rid of dead bodies Carmen has. After Carmen makes Venetti aware that he knows about his secret project with the government to develop an innovation that would get rid of radioactive wastes, Carmen manages to make Venetti agree to help him. Prof. Venetti makes him promise that he did not kill the bodies. Venetti has yet to succeed in finding such an invention because this requires a neutralization of the radioactive emanations while he has only been able to reduce the radioactive mass. With less responsibility and credibility associated with Tony\u2019s request compared to the government\u2019s, he decides to perform more risky experimentations. He finds a way to make trash disappear but by completely destroying its mass. Venetti thinks that contrary to the government, Carmen would not be curious enough to ask where the mass actually goes. Carmen does in fact ask this when Venetti shows him the machine as he is concerned that he will get caught. Venetti genuinely does not know the answer and Carmen proposes that they launch the machine as the \u201cExpendable\u201d. With his business expertise, Carmen promises to help with the launch while Venetti is still concerned with the ethical implications such as a possible rise in murder rate. Together, they go test the machine on an empty, wide land with bodyguards around in case any policemen show up. When they use it, a square shape of the horizon disappears and Tony uses the machine for corpses which Venetti ultimately understands were results of Carmen\u2019s own crime. The next morning, the innovation is featured in the newspaper as a rumor. Arcivox, a radio and TV company, expresses interest. Tony convinces Venetti to accept the offer when they come forward, saying that he will give him a large portion of the stocks.\n\nFlash forward into time, after taking the offer, Venetti is now a business man but he is not enjoying it. One day, the Atomic Energy Commission approaches his team, telling him they need to end the Expendables. They explain that their scientists used to think that the increasing hot weather was due to nuclear testing but they found that it was in fact due to the Expendables. The machines merely destroy matter but do not create any, violating the law of conversion of energy which could raise the Earth temperature to worrying extremities. Venetti argues that the public would not be willing to stop its use because of how convenient it is and instead agrees to create \u201cDisexpendibles\u201d which would create the opposite effect. When put to use, the temperature readjusts but trash reappears and so do the bodies that Tony wanted gone. At the very least, this held Tony accountable for his actions.\n"}
{"id": "61171_2", "pid": "61171_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tony Carmen and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30491, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tony Carmen is a racketeer who threatens Professor Venetti to invent the machine to decompose corpses without leaving any traces. He is also a criminal who does not care about killing people, so he orders Professor Venetti to conduct the machine to wipe off the warehouse and the people inside. It is also implied that he kills the corpse he wants to get rid of. When he receives the machine Professor Venetti creates, he gives it to his subordinates and lets them modify it. He takes Professor Venetti to the place where they try the machine's function. He has many connections to business, the mafia, and the news, and he knows how to make profits by manipulating the business work behind the scene. When he realizes how much profit the machine can make after seeing its effects, he persuades Professor Venetti to collaborate with him. He leaks the information through the newspaper to attract the business corporates\u2019 attention. When the agent from Atomic Energy Commission informs the harmful consequences of the machine, he strongly disagrees with the ban on the manufacture and the selling of the device. When Professor Venetti turns on the reverse machine, Tony is panicked, and he shouts to order the professor to turn off the engine."}
{"id": "61171_2", "pid": "61171_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tony Carmen and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30491, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tony Carmen is one of the near-mafia criminals. At the beginning, he asks a scientist called Venetti, who works in the secret radioactive wastes disposal project, to come up with a mechanism that could help Tony get rid of the bodies Harry Keno leaves at his place. Soon the professor says that he created a mechanism that works like an incinerator but with no traces. Tony tries to understand where the bodies would go after disappearing in this machine. Venetti honestly says that he doesn\u2019t know where they end up: it might be the past, the future, or another dimension. He also explains that the probability of finding these bodies is small, and Tony accepts this. Carmen also mentions that they could mass-produce these machines, which Venetti finds impractical. Tony calls it an Expendable and decides to test it. He asks his friend to halve the unit to cover the area of Harry Keno\u2019s warehouse. When the professor turns it on, the building disappears, wiping out its inhabitants - Keno and his intimates - too. Tony starts leaking information about the mechanism to intrigue potential buyers, for example, ordering a small article in the Times. Soon he gets an offer from Arcivox - a manufacturer of radio and TV sets. Tony persuades the professor to sell the potent and control the manufacturing through a separate company. Their business grows fast. Months later, Tony learns that some government officials are going to come to them. He gets into Venetti\u2019s office seconds before the AEC man shows up at the door. Tony starts threatening the officer but gets a witty comeback and then keeps silent. They hear that the government scientist learned that the energy the expendables seemingly destroyed has been turning into heat energy, increasing the mean temperature of Earth and leading to a climate catastrophe. Venetti proposes creating an engine that could use the excess energy by reversing the expendable mechanism. When they switch the engine on, Tony screams to the professor to turn the mechanism off, but the body of Harry Keno appears quickly. They both are under investigation. "}
{"id": "61171_2", "pid": "61171_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tony Carmen and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30491, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tony Carmen is a member of the Italian mob who approaches Venetti. Tony is in desperate need of a machine to get rid of bodies. He believes that Venetti could create this device. When Venetti does create it, Tony convinces him to partner with him and start selling them commercially. Tony believes that there is a big space in the market for people to buy them. After he uses the machine to get rid of some men who were messing with his business. At the end, both Tony and Venetti are put on trial. "}
{"id": "61171_2", "pid": "61171_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Tony Carmen and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30491, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Tony Carmen is a stranger who approaches Professor Venetti, claiming that he knows the Mafia. He threatens Venetti into helping him with his potential new invention. Carmen is in need of assistance to get rid of dead bodies he has. Venetti is currently working on a secret project with the government to create an innovation that would get rid of radioactive waste. Tony manages to make Venetti agree to help him by threatening him. When Venetti comes up with a machine, \u201cthe Expendable,\u201d which he took unusual risks to create, they go test it together on a wide, empty lawn. Tony\u2019s demeanor changes as he becomes more aggressive and makes the bodies, which is hinted that he actually murdered, disappear through the machine. He lures the professor to launch the machine on the market and helps him when a large corporation approaches them. As their business booms, they are approached by the Atomic Energy Commission which explains that their machines have been raising Earth\u2019s temperature and need to be stopped. The professor explains that customer behavior will be hard to change and instead creates \u201cDisexpendables\u201d which does the opposite effect. Tony is very much against this and when put to use, the bodies he hid all come back. This allows the professor to restore justice by disproving the narrative that Tony was creating in which lawyers claimed that the professor approached Tony, suggesting to help him get rid of his enemies in exchange for financial backing for his innovation.\n"}
{"id": "61171_3", "pid": "61171_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Professor Venetti\u2019s inventions and what do they do?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30495, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Professor Venetti\u2019s inventions are the Expendables which can decompose anything into nothingness without apparent side effects. It is first shown to violate the energy conservation rule when Professor Venetti finds it produces nothing after the decomposition, and he does not know where the decomposed particles go. However, later in the story, it is revealed by an investigator of the Atomic Energy Commission that the energy transformed from mass through the machine turns into heat, resulting in the rising global temperature. The other device he creates is Disexpendable, the reverse version of the Expendable. It is a medium-sized drum in a frame with an unturned coolie\u2019s hat at the bottom. Disexpendable has a low-efficiency engine, and it can consume excess energy produced by the Expendable and lower the temperature. Consuming the excess energy also makes the once-decomposed mass back together again, such as the corpse."}
{"id": "61171_3", "pid": "61171_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Professor Venetti\u2019s inventions and what do they do?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30495, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Professor Venetti\u2019s first invention is called an Expandable. Initially, it\u2019s believed to be able to destroy any physical object without any energy traces. But later the characters learn that the energy of all the waste has been turning into heat, increasing the mean temperature on Earth. This invention almost could lead to climate catastrophe. The second invention is called the Disexpendable - it is an engine that uses excess heat energy. It can be created by reversing the field of the first mechanism. It can draw back the processed material or people, as we see when the body of Harry Keno, who vanished months ago, together with his warehouse, appears on the revolving disk of the engine.  "}
{"id": "61171_3", "pid": "61171_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Professor Venetti\u2019s inventions and what do they do?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30495, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Professor Venetti worked for the U.S. government in order to make a device that could get rid of radioactive waste. The device that he created is called an expendable, and it is a box that gets rid of anything that is put in it without any trace. The inventions allow for an increased convenience for consumers who need to get rid of things. At first, the inventions were thought to have no environmental impact, but it is revealed that they had a lot of impact on global warming, as it released energy as heat energy. "}
{"id": "61171_3", "pid": "61171_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are Professor Venetti\u2019s inventions and what do they do?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30495, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Professor Venetti is working on a secret project with the government to create an innovation that would potentially be able to get rid of radioactive wastes. The problem that Venetti is faced with is that getting an energy to destroy another energy without creating new energy actually violates the law of conservation of energy. Nevertheless, Venetti tries to challenge this law. Venetti has yet to succeed in finding such an invention because this requires a neutralization of the radioactive emanations while he has only been able to reduce the radioactive mass. Ultimately, motivated by Venetti\u2019s agreement, he finds a way to make trash disappear but by completely destroying its mass. Together with Carmen, they call this machine the \u201cExpendable.\u201d The only issue is that Venetti does not actually know where the disappeared mass goes. Later, this invention causes issues as by violating the law of conservation of energy, it raises the Earth\u2019s temperature. To fix this, Venetti comes up with another invention, the \u201cDisexpendable,\u201d which would do the opposite effect, consuming the excess energy. He is able to restore the cool temperature back but as a result, this unfortunately brings back all radioactive wastes that were removed by the \u201cExpendables\u201d too.\n"}
{"id": "61171_4", "pid": "61171_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of global warming explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30500, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the story, a racketeer demands a professor create a machine to destroy the dead body he has without leaving any traces. The professor invented the device that can destroy mass into nothingness without knowing where the decomposed particles or mass go. However, later in the story, it reveals that the missing energy is turned into heat under the rule of energy conservation, resulting in a rising global temperature. The officials come to ban the usage and production of the machine, but the professor knows that people will still use it for its convenience, just like what people do concerning the wasteful use of water when it is in dire need. The professor ends up creating a machine whose side effect would cool down the temperature to fix the problem. The theme of global warming is explored through the conflicted balance between convenience and environmental damage. People tend to use what is convenient for them with the knowledge of its ecological harm until the consequence is no longer recoverable. The author tries to imply that if we keep wasting resources and damage the environment for our benefit, global warming will reach a point where the earth is no longer recoverable. It is also mentioned in the professor\u2019s thought when he is thinking about selling the machine that tons of patented perpetual motion machines are created, used, and remain as trash without the means to get rid of them. People don\u2019t care whether there is a solution to get rid of those trash completely or don\u2019t know how, but they still produce and use them. This preference for convenience over the environment indicates that humans would not stop their pollution until they bear the consequence of their deeds, not to mention improve the situation of global warming."}
{"id": "61171_4", "pid": "61171_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of global warming explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30500, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Professor Venetti was struggling when creating the mechanism because the physical law of energy conservation didn\u2019t allow him to destroy energy without its simultaneous recreation. Eventually, we learn that the Expandable was actually recreating the energy of the disintegrated matter in the form of heat. His invention led to global warming - the increase in the mean temperature on Earth. The professor realizes the danger of his invention but also admits that it\u2019s unlikely people would quickly stop using such a convenient mechanism. They would ignore the consequences. "}
{"id": "61171_4", "pid": "61171_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of global warming explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30500, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Global warming is an important theme throughout the story. At first, Venetti wanted to create a machine that could reduce the environmental impact of radioactive and nuclear waste. This type of waste harmed the environment, as before the expendables the waste was put underground, where it would seep into the ocean and water supplies. After the use of expendables increased, it seemed like there was little environmental impact, but then it was revealed that the expendables actually increased global warming. This led to Veretti creating a new device that could reverse the effects, leading to all the dead bodies coming back and Veretti getting put on trial. "}
{"id": "61171_4", "pid": "61171_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of global warming explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30500, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the main themes explored in \u201cThe Expenables\u201d is the concept of global warming. Even though published in 1962, the story gives a commentary on the roots of global warming and human responses to it. Initially, we are introduced to the issue of waste with the government and a scientist trying to figure out a way out of it. The ideal thought that we could create an invention that could simply \u201cremove\u201d trash reminds the readers of how we as humans take the consequences of our actions for granted and think that anything can be fixed, even global littering. This shows that we tend to tackle such global problems at the end of their timeline rather than try to genuinely prevent them from happening in the first place. By the end of the story, however, even when a machine has been successfully created to fix this issue, another one, an increase in Earth temperature still occurs. In other words, as the law of conversion of energy states in the story that an energy cannot be destroyed without producing another energy is similar to saying that every action has to have a consequence. The readers recognize that they cannot get the best of both worlds all the time. Venetti also mentions to the Atomic Energy Commission when they want to end the Expendables that the public would not agree to do so because of how convenient it is just like failure to stop them from watering lawns. This symbolizes how global warming or any global issue usually arises from humans\u2019 carelessness and laziness, assuming that their actions are of little importance on this big Earth.\n"}
{"id": "61171_5", "pid": "61171_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of capitalism explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30496, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The theme of capitalism is explored throughout the story by the greed of the racketeer, Tony Carmen, and how he prefers profits over the environment. In the story, Professor Venetti creates a machine that can easily decompose anything without knowing how it works and where the decomposed particles go. His process of creating the device is also not carefully examined under the safety rules. Despite knowing these manufacturing facts and the uncertainty of its consequences, Tony Carmen makes this machine into a business and sells it for a considerable profit, with the collaboration of Professor Venetti. The theme of capitalism is shown through the preference for profits over safety when seeking profits from a product. It is also explored through Tony\u2019s dealings with business corporates and how he attracts business corporations\u2019 attention to sell their products. Revealed by Tony\u2019s testimony, big business corporations would have detectives and their sources of information to buy the inventions and sell them. Finally, the mechanism of the business world and the dark side of capitalism are shown through Tony\u2019s plan to sell the products and all the dirty work behind it when Professor Venetti\u2019s secretary is reading the letters regarding their business matter from several organizations."}
{"id": "61171_5", "pid": "61171_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of capitalism explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30496, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story shows how commercial benefits may outweigh all the negative consequences of inventions and products. Tony Carmen says that the government would allow a private company like Arcivox to sell anything - they just have to find a commercial use for a potential product. Tony Carmen\u2019s and Venetti\u2019s desire to profit off of the professor\u2019s mechanism leads to global warming and makes the threat of climate doomsday more than realistic. The story also shows that people disregard environmental repercussions when the commodity they\u2019re using is convenient.\n\n\n"}
{"id": "61171_5", "pid": "61171_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of capitalism explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30496, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Capitalism is one of the most important themes in the story. Veretti\u2019s and Tony\u2019s hunger for money is what led them to selling these very controversial boxes, and Veretti deciding to look away when the boxes were used for murder. When convincing Veretti to work with him, Tony even compares him to Henry Ford and Sam Colt, two famous capitalists that also decided to look away when their inventions lead to death. Capitalism also was the reason that led to an absurd number of sales of the expendables, as consumers are always looking for their lives to be easier. The expendables provided this exact same service, as it was a very easy and simple way that people could get rid of trash."}
{"id": "61171_5", "pid": "61171_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE EXPENDABLES\n \n\n BY JIM HARMON\n \n\n It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well!\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 \"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide.\n \n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n \n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor\u2014not of medicine, anyway\u2014or a lawyer.\"\n \n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n \n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal.\"\n \n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n \n \"I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy.\"\n \n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat.\n \n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?\"\n \n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n \n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n \n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n \n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police\u2014\" I saw the answer in his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n \n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?\"\n \n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n \n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like....\"\n \n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that.\"\n \n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n \n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n \n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n \n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes\u2014radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n \n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I said. \"I'll call you.\"\n \n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\n \n \n\n \n The big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n \n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen.\n \n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done.\n \n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me\u2014any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod.\n \n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n \n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n \n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem.\n \n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen.\n \n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting.\n \n I cut corners.\n \n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n \n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be happy.\n \n I turned the machine on.\n \n The lights popped out.\n \n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox.\n \n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held.\n \n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n \n But there it was.\n \n The internal Scale showed zero.\n \n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus.\n \n I was at last violating conservation of energy\u2014not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ... by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects.\n \n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n \n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n\"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n \n \n\n \n \"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n \n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies for you.\"\n \n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't want them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n \n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n \n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know.\"\n \n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of\u2014incinerator.\"\n \n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before.\"\n \n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n \n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in\u2014well, everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n \n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics.\n \n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future.\"\n \n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation.\n \n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n \n \"Or six million years.\"\n \n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n \n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n \n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?\"\n \n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n \n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n \n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require....\"\n \n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n \n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia\u2014\"\n \n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically.\"\n \n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial.\n \n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but there are ways , Professor. I know. I'm a business man\u2014\"\n \n \"You are ?\" I said.\n \n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n \n \"You are .\"\n \n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything.\"\n \n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n \n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n \n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n \n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete without one.\"\n \n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n \n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n \n Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with\u2014like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it.\n \n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity, they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n \n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work.\n \n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it.\n \n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\n \n \n\n \n The closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n \n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n \n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street.\n \n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed me.\n \n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n \n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n \n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it.\"\n \n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n \n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n \n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n \n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n \n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as necessity dictated.\n \n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem.\"\n \n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n \n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n \n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped.\n \n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred.\n \n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n \n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n \n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone\u2014in fact, exactly halved.\n \n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\" There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n\"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area.\"\n \n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics.\"\n \n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n \n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?\"\n \n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories .\"\n \n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.\n \n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n \n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n \n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n \n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder .\"\n \n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no corpus delecti .\"\n \n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n \n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember, you did it with your machine.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those machines sit there?\"\n \n \n\n \n There were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning.\n \n One two-inch story\u2014barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration\u2014told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.)\n \n The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government\u2014!\u2014developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n \n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n \n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n \n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang.\n \n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door.\n \n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action, Professor.\"\n \n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n \n \"He's not even indicted you , Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times .\"\n \n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants.\"\n \n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n \n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?\"\n \n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves\u2014no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n \n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n \n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n\"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of its stock.\"\n \n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer\u201449% and my good health.\n \n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?\"\n \n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it.\"\n \n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n \n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n \n I knew what to tell them.\n \n \n\n \n I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault\u2014The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office.\n \n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n \n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it, Professor Venetti?\"\n \n I agreed that it was.\n \n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n \n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming.\n \n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n \n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n \n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n \n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it\u2014I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even.\n \n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n \n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness.\n \n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n \n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown.\n \n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC? CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n \n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n \n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n \n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I asked.\n \n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n \n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n \n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\n \n \n\n \n Once seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n \n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n \n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished with its deportations a few years back.\"\n \n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?\"\n \n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n \n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n \n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the service,\" he panted weakly.\n \n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n \n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n \n \"Clever of them.\"\n \n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly . It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually\u2014\"\n \n He paused dramatically.\n \n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat . You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!\"\n \n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n \n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to that.\"\n \n I waved his protests aside.\n \n \"I would agree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n \n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n \n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n \n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then\u2014we'll be damned?\"\n \n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n \n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom.\n \n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential.\"\n \n \n\n \n The agent of the AEC whose name I can never remember was present along\n with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had\n outlined.\n \n While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more\n visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a\n tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom.\n \n Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to\n revolve.\n \n \"Is it my imagination,\" the agent asked, \"or is it getting cooler in\n here?\"\n \n \"Professor.\" Carmen gave me a warning nudge.\n \n There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some\n shiny gray metal.\n \n \"Kill the power, Professor,\" Carmen said.\n \n \"Can it be,\" I wondered, \"that the machine is somehow recreating or\n drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?\"\n \n \"Shut the thing off, Venetti!\" the racketeer demanded.\n \n But too late.\n \n There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning\n circle of metal.\n \n If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that\n merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense\n value on the nature of time and space.\n \n As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in\n connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit.\n \n I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious\n story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony\n Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his\n financial backing for the exploitation of my invention.\n \n This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the\n machine known as the Expendable.\n \n I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once\n more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too\n low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in\n these days of nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck\n with the problem of waste disposal ... including all that I dumped\n before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all.\n \n If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters\n towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of capitalism explored throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30423, "query_start_index": 30425, "query_end_index": 30496, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the main themes explored in \u201cThe Expenables\u201d is also the concept of capitalism. We are first introduced to a scientist working for the government with the best intentions to find a fix to a global issue through innovation. As the story goes on, however, he is lured by a stranger belonging to the mafia to take the easy and riskier path to speed up the process of creating a successful innovation. Additionally, when this machine works, we see the professor ditch his ethical concerns around it and rather starts getting attracted by the financial benefits he is told he could get by the stranger if he were to launch his product on the market. Instead of sticking with his initial intentions of helping the government, he chooses to partner with a large corporation who takes on his machines worldwide as he is promised a big sum of the stocks. This showcases human greed that arises from capitalism and how it can consume an individual to the point that they disregard all ethical thoughts, even when on a global level. Moreover, we are introduced to the idea of convenience the public is used to. Instead of ending his machines, the scientist creates another machine to counter the effect of his first one as he believes the public will not be able to part its convenience. This showcases the speed as to which capitalism has led our lives to adapt to and how because of that, people would choose convenience over the greater good at any time.\n"}
{"id": "40968_1", "pid": "40968_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29091, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows the journey of Martin Isherwood, a man whose dream is to become a rocket pilot. Everything he does is to reach that dream. When he turns 17, he cuts away from his family and starts to follow his dream. He participates in different plane races in order to become a pilot. He continuously shows his determination to become a pilot to everyone he meets, and doesn\u2019t care what they say. Mostly everyone tells Ish that he should quit on this path, that he has nothing to prove and that there is no reason to continue pursuing his dream. He doesn\u2019t heed this advice and continues convincing people as to why he should be a rocket pilot. At the end, he manages to do the trip, but does it while thinking that he had already done it before, therefore taking out all the excitement that the first trip would have had. He ends up never driving a rocket again, and dies in the rocket station. "}
{"id": "40968_1", "pid": "40968_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29091, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Isherwood, as a small young man, tells his father that he is a rocket pilot when his father tells him that he cannot afford to send him to college. His father begins to laugh, and Martin decides to run away. His mother comes in and asks what is wrong, and his father tells her about what their son has claimed as his trade. Margaret is confused, and Howard tries to chase him as Ish hops on a bus and goes away. When the man tells his faculty advisor that he is not interested in a degree, the advisor is exasperated because he has been doing math and engineering for the past nine semesters. Ish says that he is signed up for Astronomy 101, and he tries to argue why this course is different. Ish offers for them to get a beer together instead, since it will be impossible to convince him. He does not understand the advisor\u2019s poetry, and the advisor comments that he is a specialist. The scene then cuts to The Navion taking a boiling thermal under its right wing, buckling suddenly and tilting. Ish tells Nan to relax, but she is afraid of how low he is flying. As Ish does a few more tricks, he suddenly feels fear because the aircraft begins to act strangely. Nan is curious why he is so desperate to win the Vandenberg Cup next week. He reveals that this is all part of his plan of being a rocket pilot, and Nan does not understand. The scene then cuts to four years later, as Ish brings the Mark VII out of her orbit and gives the technicians a report. Nan tells him that he has accomplished his dream, but Ish suddenly feels tired and outraged that the pile of tin can be considered a rocket. The Flight Surgeon then talks to him in another scene, asking if he would like to talk to a man named MacKenzie. Ish agrees, and MacKenzie asks him questions about his personal life. The therapist offers shock therapy, but Martin insists that it did not work. The receptionist at the front desk tries to get him to fill out paperwork too, but he vehemently refuses and complains that he has no time. The scene then cuts to the Personnel Manager meeting him, and they discuss the plans moving forward. The Personnel Manager discusses the rocket some more with him, before the scene cuts to a crew chief waking him up to go to the station. After his trip, MacKenzie is waiting for him at the crew station. MacKenzie tells him that he was hypnotized because his lack of interests and emotions prevented him from being the best. Ish refuses to believe it, and MacKenzie says that he had to cancel the thrill of it by making him experience the Moon and death. Ish dies in space after MacKenzie leaves, having lost his passion while staring at the stars. "}
{"id": "40968_1", "pid": "40968_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29091, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At the beginning, as a small boy, Marty Isherwood tells his father that he will be a rocket pilot. The man starts laughing at this, and Marty, infuriated, walks out of their house. His mother, Marge, tries to understand what happened while her son gets on some bus. Later, Martin is older and talking to his faculty advisor about the classes he plans on taking. We learn that the young man has taken almost every math and engineering class and has signed up for astronomy. His advisor doesn\u2019t understand why Martin is avoiding liberal arts classes. They go to a bar where the adviser again wonders what specialty made Martin abandon all the other existing disciplines. Martin assures him there\u2019s a purpose behind it. \nNow Martin is a certified pilot. He\u2019s on the board of the Navion plane with a girl named Nan. He makes the plane dive and tilt, which scares her. At some point, he becomes delusional and brings the plane higher and higher before he finally hears the girl\u2019s screams. Martin tells her he cannot marry her because he is not rich, and it will take years before he becomes a real rocket pilot. Nan doesn\u2019t understand his passion. Years later, Martin manages to spin around the Earth on the ship Mark VII for two days. He\u2019s not satisfied. While walking from the ship, he meets Nan, who tells him that she understands his passion now and is happy he\u2019s done. He becomes angry and says that he\u2019s not finished anything. He talks to a psychiatrist named Mackenzie assigned to him by the Air Force. The man asks questions about his first jobs at the airports near Miami. He makes sure Martin has no family. Then he suddenly shocks him by saying that Martin can\u2019t go - this maddens the pilot. Seconds later, the doctor apologizes, claiming that it was shotgun therapy to check his reactions. Next, Martin argues with some receptionist, trying to convince her to help him get back - apparently, he died. He says he has a job. He forces her to call the Personnel Manager. Martin tells the man that he only has six hours before the flight to the Moon and asks for a postponement so that he could finish the journey. The manager then shows Martin the Earth, and the man realizes he\u2019s standing in one of the lunar craters. Martin finally wakes up just an hour before the launch. He completes the flight but is dissatisfied. Mackenzie meets him in the crew section and explains that he had to hypnotize Martin before the flight, make him believe he had died and had been to the Moon. The Air Force was not sure Martin, who had no ties to the planet and no interests, would\u2019ve come back. The hallucination made the pilot believe he had already been to the Moon, thus taking the adventure out of the actual flight.\n"}
{"id": "40968_1", "pid": "40968_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29091, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Isherwood, a young man, desiring to be a rocket pilot, cuts his tie to his family around the age of seventeen because his father does not support or believe in his dream. His school advisor also does not understand his choice of taking a similar class because it will teach him how to look at the star differently. The advisor tries to convince him to change his career, but he fails. They go to a bar and chat about Ish's crazy dream.\n\nThe scene then changes to a racing plane where Ish, as a trained pilot, teases the girl Nan sitting beside him. He constantly flies a dangerous route to tease her. After a dangerous flight, he talks about the difficulty of marrying her due to his career, and she questions his career. He gives up on making her understand his ambition and breaks up with her. A week later, he wins the championship of the Vandenberg Cup, which will give him a lot of job opportunities in the pilot market. After several successes in the field, he meets his ex-girlfriend, Nan. She tries to apologize for her inability to understand him, but he does not want to listen. He does not think that she still understands him. He is raged.\n\nThe flight surgeon tells him to sit and calm down. He asks Ish to meet a therapist called MacKenzie. MacKenzie asks Ish some questions casually, and Ish responds appropriately because of the recorder he sees under Mackenzie's lapel. After the conversation, he refuses to fill out the application and yells for the personnel manager to come. The personnel manager tells him that what he thinks is not real. He does not believe it. Then he wakes up from the hallucination of going to the moon. MacKenzie tells him that he never goes to the moon. He dies shortly after that."}
{"id": "40968_2", "pid": "40968_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Nan, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29097, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Nan is a woman, who for a while is Martin Isherwood\u2019s girlfriend. She owns a racing plane, which Ish uses to win a race and continue his plan to become a rocket pilot. When she and Ish go on a practice flight, Ish almost crashes them because for a second he wanted the plane all the way to the moon. For a while she wanted to get married to him, but he never reciprocated the feeling because he was too focused on flying to the moon, and ended up driving her away. The story insinuates that they broke up after Ish orbited the earth on a ship. "}
{"id": "40968_2", "pid": "40968_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Nan, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29097, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Nan is Ish\u2019s ex-lover and a pretty brunette girl. Initially, Ish takes her on his plane and often scares her because he is willing to do whatever it takes to become a rocket pilot. Nan finds it difficult to understand his obsession with winning the Vandenberg Cup, as he is already a trained pilot and can probably find even better employment somewhere else. However, Ish believes that it is his life and part of the reason why he cannot get married. She tries to explain that being a rocket pilot is unrealistic, but he only ignores her and is determined. Later, Nan comes to greet Ish four years later after he brings the Mark VII out of orbit. She congratulates him on flying the rocket and apologizes for not understanding earlier how much it all meant to him. One of the technicians tries to pull Nan away when Ish feels tired. He has an outburst at her about the rocket until the guards come. Later, Nan is not mentioned again as Ish explains that he has no woman anymore. However, it is noted that the receptionist he talks to resembles Nan. "}
{"id": "40968_2", "pid": "40968_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Nan, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29097, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Nan was Martin\u2019s girlfriend when he was a certified plane pilot. She\u2019s on the board of the Navion when they go through the turbulence zone. Martin decides to tease her and dips the nose of the plane in a shallow dive, terrifying her even more. Seconds later, Martin seems to lose the connection with reality and starts bringing the plane higher in the air. Nan screams his name several times before he realizes what he\u2019s doing and stops the rapid movement upwards. Martin then tells her he cannot marry her because he doesn\u2019t have any stable source of income, and she might as well end up a poor widow. She asks him why he has to win the Vandenberg cup. Martin explains that the victory will allow him to get the Chief Test Pilot\u2019s job, but becoming the first rocket pilot will take more than that. In reply, she can only remind him that there aren\u2019t any man-carrying rockets yet. Next, we see Nan four years later when she breaks out of the press section and runs to Martin, who has just finished his orbital flight. She apologizes for not understanding how much this dream meant to him. She is glad he has flown his rocket - this phrase shocks Martin and makes him outraged. He angrily screams at her terrified face that he doesn\u2019t care what takes him to the Moon, but he hasn\u2019t been there yet. The guards pull her away from him. "}
{"id": "40968_2", "pid": "40968_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Nan, and what happens to her?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29097, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Nan is the girl who sits in the Navion, a racing plane owned by Ish. She has short dark hair and white skin. She is teased by Ish's flying skill when they ride on the Navion together. She seems to be his girlfriend. She tries to convince Ish that he may change his career, but her words rage Ish. She breaks up with him. After four years, she sees his success and realizes her immaturity beforehand, so she tries to redeem the relationship. She breaks through the press section, trying to apologize to Ish, but Ish is raged by her word. She is terrified. The security comes and gets her away."}
{"id": "40968_3", "pid": "40968_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Isherwood, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29119, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Isherwood is the main character of the story. He only wants one thing in life, which is to drive a rocket to the moon. Everything he does in his life is to reach that goal, he pushes everyone away. He pushes away his parents and his girlfriend because they didn\u2019t understand the dream he was trying to accomplish. He is described as very determined, as he only has one thing in mind. He is also very stubborn, doesn\u2019t heed the advice of others and also is described as irritable. "}
{"id": "40968_3", "pid": "40968_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Isherwood, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29119, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Isherwood starts off as a boy who wants to become a rocket pilot. At age seventeen, he is one hundred and two pounds, four feet eleven, and had just run away from home. Ish is very stubborn, refusing to take any other class that is not math or engineering. Even when his advisor tries to make him change his mind, he refuses until the very end. Ish is very clueless outside of rocket piloting, completely unaware of how the advisor references poetry or any forms of literature. He later grows to around five feet and also becomes somewhat of a daredevil. When Nan and him are in the plane, he purposely does tricks that he knows will scare her. He, however, becomes obsessed with being a rocket pilot to the point where he abandons his family and has no friends. Ish eventually becomes very impatient and snappy too, refusing to believe anything else that does not involve rockets or piloting. He is so passionate about his dream that he is willing to disregard everything else that makes him human. It is so dangerous that MacKenzie has to have him hypnotized in order for him to stay grounded. "}
{"id": "40968_3", "pid": "40968_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Isherwood, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29119, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Isherwood is a trained rocket pilot who has been dreaming of harnessing space since early childhood. He is very determined and ambitious. We can see that even when he is just a child who is ready to oppose his father\u2019s opinion. He seems fearless and playful when he\u2019s on the Navion with Nan. He teases her and talks about the possibility of marriage in the distant future. But eventually, his fanaticism replaces all the other emotions. When he meets her again, he can only think about his flight, his space dream, not her. Martin doesn't talk to his family, has no romantic partner, and there is no mention of any of his friends. He becomes obsessed with space, with the flight to the Moon. Space travel becomes the main reason why Martin is alive. And when the illusion takes the thrill out of his flight, he dies from dissatisfaction, a lack of a real purpose in life. \n"}
{"id": "40968_3", "pid": "40968_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Martin Isherwood, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29119, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Martin Isherwood is the son of Howard Isherwood and Margaret Isherwood. He is a rocket pilot who has set his dream since his childhood. His pursuit of being a rocket pilot is very perseverant and does not allow any doubts or unsupported. Due to this persistence and stubbornness, he shuts himself off from any relationships or entertainment in life, leading that the meaning of his life is only to be a rocket pilot. He is easily outraged by the words or actions of questioning or misunderstanding his ambition. Until the end of the story, where he learns that he has been hypnotized to imagine landing on the moon, he finally gives up the rocket pilot dream and feels betrayed by it."}
{"id": "40968_4", "pid": "40968_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mackenzie, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29103, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mackenzie is an army therapist who first meets Martin when he is asked to vet him before he goes on a trip for the airforce. Mackenzie tries to test Martin a lot, but ends up clearing him and allowing him to fly. At the end, it is also Mackenzie who tells Martin what had actually happened to him, and that what he thought was a routine trip was in fact Martin\u2019s first trip to the moon. Mackenzie struggles with telling Martin this, but ends up doing it. This news ends up hurting Martin mentally, and it is insinuated that Martin holds a grudge forever against Mackenzie."}
{"id": "40968_4", "pid": "40968_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mackenzie, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29103, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "MacKenzie is the therapist who Ish meets after the Flight Surgeon introduces him as a big gun in the head-thumping racket. MacKenzie specializes in shock therapy, and he starts off by asking Ish a lot about his life. He asks Ish questions such as whether he has any families or a woman; this is done in order to build a basic profile of the other man. MacKenzie is noted to be taking any notes, instead preferring to record their conversation with his portable tape-recorder. MacKenzie also administers shotgun therapy on Ish, which he does not realize the effects of until later. MacKenzie does not appear again until Ish is at the station, where he reveals that he hypnotized Ish in order to bring him back. He reveals that everything Ish felt about death and the moon is not real in order to not have him completely lost to the idea of being a rocket pilot. "}
{"id": "40968_4", "pid": "40968_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mackenzie, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29103, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mackenzie is a psychiatrist who is sent to Martin by the Air Force. The Flight Surgeon lets him into the room where Martin is sitting. The psychiatrist asks Martin several questions about his previous jobs at the airports near Miami, his family, and a possible girlfriend. Then he unexpectedly tells Martin that he can\u2019t go to space which causes an immediate aggressive reaction from the pilot. Mackenzie apologizes and explains that he just decided to use shotgun therapy to check Martin\u2019s reactions and drives. The doctor feels embarrassed. Then at some point, Mackenzie hypnotizes Martin, making him believe that he has already been to the Moon. When Martin comes back from the flight, the doctor tells him the truth, claiming that it was the only way to make sure that Martin comes back and doesn\u2019t go farther. "}
{"id": "40968_4", "pid": "40968_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Mackenzie, and what happens to him?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29103, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "MacKenzie is a psychiatrist. He meets Martin Isherwood when the flight surgeon tells Martin to meet him. MacKenzie asks Martin several questions but does not pay special attention to his answers. He has a portable tape recorder under his lapel. His face always has no judgments whenever Ish responds to his questions. He wears a tailored suit. He is skinny. His hair is washed-out. At the end of his conversation with Ish, he suddenly commands Ish, making Ish angry. It turns out that it is some therapy, and MacKenzie is embarrassed. MacKenzie hypnotizes Ish. When Ish wakes up from the hallucination, MacKenzie tells him the truth."}
{"id": "40968_5", "pid": "40968_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of other people's words about the rocket?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29127, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the greatest challenges that Martin faces in his journey to become a rocket pilot is the negativity that comes from other people. Almost everyone that Martin meets advises him that he is wasting his life, and that he should focus on something more realistic that can allow him to have a family. His parents, his girlfriend, and Mackenzie all tell him that he should settle for a plane pilot or should focus his career on something else, something less risky. These words only help to make Martin more determined to become a pilot, because he wants to prove everyone wrong. "}
{"id": "40968_5", "pid": "40968_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of other people's words about the rocket?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29127, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Other people\u2019s words about the rocket is significant because it reveals how far gone Ish already is in comparison to everyone else. When Nan mentions that he has already flown a rocket, Ish yells at her that it is not enough because it is not considered a true rocket. Even when the Flight Surgeon speaks to him, he is mostly impatient about the rocket. When MacKenzie brings up the rocket and his goal later, it shows the significance of what Ish has done to achieve his dream. He has no family, friends, or has formed any sort of meaningful relationship. In addition, he has also never touched another book or literature that was not related to space, math, or engineering. The other people\u2019s words about the rocket only illustrate Ish\u2019s own stunted development out of his obsession with becoming a pilot for it. "}
{"id": "40968_5", "pid": "40968_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of other people's words about the rocket?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29127, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "People\u2019s comments about a man-carrying rocket that didn\u2019t exist when Martin was a young boy only encouraged him to work harder to achieve his dream. When his dad bursts out laughing at his words about becoming a rocket pilot, little Marty walks away while his parents are ordering him to come back. He remembers their screams when he realizes that he can go to space after the conversation with Mackenzie. When Nan tells him that there are no man-carrying rockets, he says that it\u2019s not his problem, implying that they will be invented at some point and he will be the one who travels to the Moon on one of them. When several years later, she tells him happily that he\u2019s flown his rocket - he becomes angry. Martin shows that he\u2019s way more obsessed now and doesn\u2019t really care about the means of transport that will take him to the Moon. What he cares about is the thrill of the unknown. "}
{"id": "40968_5", "pid": "40968_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHe had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....\n \n \n\n DESIRE NO MORE\n \n \n by Algis Budrys\n \n \n ( illustrated by Milton Luros )\n \n \n \" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... \"\n \n \n \u2014Chaucer\n \n \n \n THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n \n \"But you've got to learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n \n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n \n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n \n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.\n \n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n \n \"A rocket pilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. \"A ro\u2014 oh, no! \u2014a rocket pilot !\"\n \n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n \n \" Marty! \" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n \n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.\n \n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. \" Come back here! \" he shouted. \"A rocket pilot,\" he cursed under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!\"\n \n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n\"But\u2014isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n \n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! \" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n \n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n \n \"Yes, I'm sure !\"\n \n \"But, where's he going?\"\n \n \" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?\"\n \n \" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?\"\n \n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n\"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n \n \n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of age at seventeen.\n \n \n \n THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not interested in working for a degree.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?\"\n \n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n \n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?\"\n \n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav\u2014they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n \n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n \n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer.\"\n \n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\" he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.\n \n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted: \n\"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n \n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.\n \n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n \n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket.\"\n \n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n\"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n \n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n \n \"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n \n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n \n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?\"\n \n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\n \n \n \n THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n \n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n\"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n \n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n \n \" Low? Call this low?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n \n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings\u2014there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. \"Up!\"\n \n The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n \n \"Marty!\"\n \n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare you\u2014?\" he asked gently.\n \n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n \n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n \n \n \n \"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n \n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot.\"\n \n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed\u2014more\u2014he slumped\u2014and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n \n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States\u2014Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014 any of them\u2014and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that\u2014\" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've told you all this before.\"\n \n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's that rocket pilot business again....\"\n \n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I\u2014\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.\n \n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time.\"\n \n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets.\"\n \n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n \n \n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\n \n \n \n HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.\n \n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.\n \n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a technician.\n \n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n \n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n \n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.\n \n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n \n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \" Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n\"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!\"\n \n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.\n \n \n \n \"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\n  They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n \n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n \n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.\n \n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n \n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n \n \"Uh- huh .\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n\"Look\u2014you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n \n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n \n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast.\"\n \n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure. Bring him on.\"\n \n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's\u2014uh\u2014he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?\"\n \n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.\n \n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n \n Ish nodded.\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the recorder's benefit.\n \n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n \n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n \n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n \n \"Ahuh.\"\n \n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n \n \"Right.\"\n \n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements\u2014he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man\u2014only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n \n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous\u2014red-letter dangerous\u2014because of it.\n \n \"No family.\"\n \n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them.\"\n \n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression\u2014but it still passed no judgements.\n \n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n \n \"About normal.\"\n \n \"No wife\u2014no steady girl.\"\n \n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n \n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n \n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n \n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.\"\n \n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him\u2014anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n\"You through with me?\"\n \n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n \n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n \n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n \n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd\u2014that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.\n \n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\n \n \n \n ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"But everybody fills out an application,\" she protested.\n \n \"No. I've got a job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.\n \n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.\"\n \n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n \n \"But nobody goes back.\"\n \n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but\u2014\" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room\u2014a big room, he realized\u2014seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n \n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n \n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the literature ...\" She swiveled her chair slowly.\n \n \"No wings,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n \n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n \n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n \n \"Who do I see?\"\n \n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n \n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n \n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n \n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.\n \n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\n \n \n \n THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n \n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm very glad to meet you!\"\n \n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n \n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n \n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n \n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n \n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he\u2014shucks?\u2014the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n \n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n \n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.\n \n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got\u2014\" He stopped to look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now.\"\n \n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look\u2014you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it\u2014that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.\"\n \n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\" he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week\u2014no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to\u2014as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose\u2014\" he began, but Ish interrupted him.\n \n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have\u2014but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?\"\n \n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n \n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n \n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n \n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.\"\n \n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.\n \n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.\n \n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n \n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.\n \n He looked around him. The Moon was silent\u2014quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.\n \n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.\n \n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n \n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets.\"\n \n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here\u2014vacuum.\"\n \n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear\u2014and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n \n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.\n \n \n \n \"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n\"Will you get a load of this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n \n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.\n \n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n \n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n \n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n \n \n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.\n \n \n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n \n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n \n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.\n \n \n \n MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n \n \"Ish.\"\n \n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n \n Ish grunted.\n \n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n \n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n \n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. \"You were the best there was\u2014but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot\u2014nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! \"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n \n He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n \n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.\"\n \n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n \n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. \"\n \n \n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again\u2014he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.\n \n \n\n TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\n \n \n Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n \n \n This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of other people's words about the rocket?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29049, "query_start_index": 29051, "query_end_index": 29127, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the story, whenever Martin Isherwood, a trained pilot who has been dreaming of going to the moon, talks about his dream, people either do not believe in him or misunderstand him. When people try to convince Martin to pursue another career or face reality, they always say that there is no man-carrying rocket in the world, to which Martin always responds with an answer that it is not his problem. However, these words suggest that Martin's dream is unfulfillable initially, but he does not believe in it and keeps his pursuit until his death. These words about the nonexistence of the man-carrying rocket imply the consequence of the story that all of Martin's journey is imaginary and hallucinated. His dream ends up being a joke to himself."}
{"id": "24949_1", "pid": "24949_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30794, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in the fourth millennium, and humans have invented a technology - the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle -  that allows them to explore the neighboring cosmic systems. In the past, they were invaded by an alien species called Hymenops, or the Bees, who enslaved Terrans, and tried to colonize other planets but unexpectedly left years later. The crew members of the spaceship Marco Four are on a mission looking for the slave colonies that were abandoned by the Bees. Farrell, the navigator, is arguing with captain Stryker, Gibson - an engineer - and Xavier, the ship\u2019s mechanic, and is trying to convince them to land on Alphard Six and claiming the planet is not inhabited. Stryker reminds him about the importance of vigilance on unexplored territories and tells Farrell to find a reconnaissance spiral. Something resembling an atomic torpedo explodes near the ship, rocking it. Later, the crew starts discussing who can possibly live on Alphard Six. They know that in the year 3000, there was no one on the planet. The ones who attacked them might be the Hymenopes or some Terrans enslaved by them, or even an unknown alien culture. The screen shows a town with a thousand buildings and a prehistoric ship with rocket propulsion. This ship seems to be eleven hundred years old, which is puzzling. This atomic-powered spaceship neither could\u2019ve been constructed here nor could it have successfully traveled for hundreds of years. The area around Alphard Six was guarded by the Bees for several hundred years. So, it would be impossible for this ancient Terran ship to land on the planet without being detected by them. Farrell interrupts the discussion and suggests they go down and look. He gets on a helihopper, and Xavier quickly disappears in his scouter. The two other crew members left on the ship say that they just detected an electromagnetic vibration. Farrell notices a bonfire near the town. He is ready to report it when his helihopper suddenly jerks, a flare of electric discharge blinds him, and Farrell loses consciousness. He wakes up in an infirmary. A doctor speaks in unintelligible words and gestures to Farrell to follow him. While walking through the corridors of the ancient ship, he notices Xavier\u2019s scouter, and later the Marco Four. Shocked, Farrell rapidly plunges inside the spaceship, and it darts up when suddenly Stryker appears from the sleeping cubicle and orders him to fly back. Gibson explains that Farrell piloted his helihopper into power lines and crashed. The Alphardians tried to communicate with the crew using an electromagnetic wave language and never attacked them. The Bees made the ancestors of these people believe that they were the descendants of an Earth expedition that perished a thousand years ago. The Alphardians don\u2019t even know the Hymenops. Apparently, the Bees wanted to monitor the human species in a natural habitat. But they never understood human logic and after all, left all their colonies. "}
{"id": "24949_1", "pid": "24949_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30794, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Navigator Arthur Farrell is considered the youngest and most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamations crew. The crew has gone to the Alphard Six, which has a cool green disk. The other members of the crew are Stryker, Gibson, and Xavier. Stryker berates Farrell and begins citing the Reclamations Handbook about the rules regarding unreclaimed worlds. Farrell argues that it was never colonized, while Gibson looks up from his chess game and says there is no point in taking a chance of not encountering any of the Hymenops. Farrell says that they will never see a Hymenop, but Stryker says that he fought them for the better half of the century and still does not understand how they behave. They decide to find a reconnaissance spiral, despite Farrell grumbling. They examine whether anything is damaged on the Marco Four, after an explosion, and find that the only component that requires fixing is the Zero Transfer computer. Gibson explains that they cannot be Hymenops since the Bees put their faith in Ringwave energy fields. Although Stryker proposes colonists migrating from somewhere else, Gibson explains that it is impossible for the human slaves of the Hymenops to develop interstellar travel in four generations. Farrell volunteers to go down for the field work; Xavier announces that the planet is uninhabited except for a large island. There is a central city with a thousand buildings, and Farrell is relieved they are human. The power the people use runs on continuous fission, which surprises everyone. It is quite surprising for the crew to see an eleven-hundred year old Terran ship land on the planet. Stryker explains to Farrell that it had to be flown here because there are no materials on Alphard Six to create it. Gibson believes that the ship was built during the Twenty-second century, even though the atomic wars destroyed all historical records. Farrell decides that the only way is to go down and see for themselves. Xavier picks up an electromagnetic vibration pattern, and Farrell reports that he is passing over a hamlet nearest to the city. Suddenly, he is hit by an electric discharge and wakes up in an infirmary. A man comes and takes him out, despite speaking a different language, and he realizes that one of the old ventures had actually succeeded. He sees that the Marco Four has been grounded too and runs to the ship before pushing some controls to take off again. Stryker brings the ship down again, and Farrell is shocked because he thought they were shot down. It turns out that the Alphardians had been trying to send a distress signal. Gibson further explains that they had come from one of the first Bee colonies and were led to believe that their ship missed Sirius; however, the colonists are excited to enjoy assimilation. Although the Bees tried to set up the experiment to understand humans, the invaders failed at truly understanding them. "}
{"id": "24949_1", "pid": "24949_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30794, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows a Terran Reclamations crew aboard the Marco Four as they search for Terran colonies previously enslaved and since abandoned by the Bees. As they travel around, a sudden atomic fire hits the ship and the crew hurry to figure out where it had come from and who potentially caused it. Debating between Hymenops, resurgent colonists,  trans-Alphardians, or even a joint hallucination, the crew decide to investigate further. Xavier, the mechanical, surveys the planet and finds the landscape to be Terran, though with primitive technology at best. These findings leave them more confused than before, as they then debate how an eleven hundred years old ship could be there. \n\nDeciding then to investigate first-hand and see, Farrell goes into the helihopper and enters the colony. Just as Gibson encourages to go forward as it seems like the colony is communicating with them, Farrell crashes into an electrical line and falls unconscious. As he wakes up, Farrell is met by an unfamiliar medic and follows him out to a well-formed colony, marvelling at the presumed success of old ventures. However, he panics when he sees the Marco Four grounded and presumes his crewmates are in danger, and so he hurriedly rushes onboard and puts it in flight. Stryker stumbles out and takes them back down as Gibson quickly explains to Farrell the situation. It turns out that there is no danger at hand - the crash that landed Farrell unconscious was just an electrical line for the colony's hamlets. The colony, the Alphardians, are friendly and excited to be found. Although using Terran architecture and technology, these Alphardians were experimental human subjects by the Hymenops and observed by the Bees. The Bees chose to abandon their control colony when the Alphardians didn't show much - much like the old tale of Terrans not understanding alien culture either. In the end, the Alphardians are excited to assimilate into Terran colonists. "}
{"id": "24949_1", "pid": "24949_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30794, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A Terran Reclamation crew arrives Alphard Six to find Terran colonies enslaved and abandoned by the Bees, or Hymenops, an alien species who retreated a hundred years ago. When the youngest navigator, Farrell, attempts to planetfall without scouting the planet, the captain, Stryker, reminds him of the possible danger of the planet and the necessity of reconnaissance. After arguing with other crew members, Farrell finally accepts to scout the unobserved world first. However, they are suddenly attacked by a thing rising from the land below. After the examination, Gibson, the engineer, announces that the only damage is Zero Interval Transfer Computer, used to operate the Transfer jump in space. The repairing time takes a couple of hours. Stryker worries about the possible attack during the repairing time, so they dispute the potential situation of the planet, and none of the hypotheses, such as the Hymenops\u2019 colorizations, Earthmen\u2019s ancient colonization, or the resurgent Terran colonization, hold based on technological development. Stryker concludes that they have to investigate the land themselves. Farrell volunteers to be the one. They see the ground through magnoscanner, finding a damaged spaceship that served as a power supply with the prehistoric technology, namely atomic fission. According to Gibson, the atomic-powered ship was no longer built after the atomic wars in the twenty-second century; the damaged ship must either be flown or be built on the planet. His hypothesis is rejected by Stryker and Farrell based on the impossibility of the long-range travel capability of the atomic-powered spaceship. They continue their endless debate until Farrell takes the helihopper to investigate. Xavier, the mechanic, uses his drone to scout ahead of Farrell, but soon the scouter is detected by the people on the planet. They try to communicate with them with the electron beam. When Farrell reaches the end of the forest, entering the fields, he is suddenly struck and passes out. When he wakes up, he is in an infirmary; an anachronistic man comes in. He talks and gestures unintelligibly, but Farrell follows him out, seeing Xavier\u2019s scouter with port open. When Farrell follows the man, he sees Marco Four landed with the port open. Held by the guess that these people may possess higher technology and capture all of them, Farrell rushes into Marco Four, closes the port, and rises. Stryker appears and comes to him with bewilderment, driving the spaceship to land again. It is later explained that Hymenops take these people as the experimental object. The damaged ship was an expedition ship, which failed its duty. Hymenops found its derelict during their invasion and colonization of Terran planets. They put these people on the planet, made them believe that their ancestors were the crewmembers of the damaged ship, and conducted this experiment as a control group, compared to other experiments on other planets."}
{"id": "24949_2", "pid": "24949_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Farrell and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30824, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Arthur Farrell is the ship\u2019s navigator, the youngest and most impulsive member of the crew. He tries to convince captain Stryker to land on Alphard Six, claiming that it cannot be inhabited. Stryker doesn\u2019t agree and orders Farrell to find a reconnaissance spiral. After the torpedo explodes near the ship, they all discuss who the attackers could be. Farrell points out that there was no sign of life on Alphard Six around the year 3000, so the inhabitants appeared after this. Farrell agrees to be sent to the planet\u2019s surface and explore. They continue talking and soon see an ancient ship in the center of the planet\u2019s town. Farrell is quick to state that it couldn\u2019t have come from Earth because it would've taken hundreds of years to travel here, and the ship\u2019s ancient technology is not effective enough for such a voyage. Irritated, he interrupts the discussion and suggests he and Xavier go down and see who the inhabitants are. Farrell flies in a helihopper and notices a bonfire near the town. He starts reporting when the helihopper\u2019s carriage crumples, an electric discharge blinds Farrell, and he momentarily loses consciousness. Later, he wakes up with a brutal headache in an infirmary inside the ancient ship. A medic with anachronistic spectacles and gray hair uses unintelligible words and gestures to Farrell to follow him. They pass several open ports, and he sees Xavier\u2019s scouter and later the Marco Four. Shocked, he runs to the spaceship and takes off, when unexpectedly Stryker appears near him, ordering him to take the ship down. Soon Gibson explains that Farrell piloted into metallic power lines, and the crash put him out for almost a day. These Alphardians are incredibly friendly. The object the crew considered a torpedo was actually an emergency boat the inhabitants sent to the spaceship to make sure the people on board noticed their colony. Their spaceship\u2019s technology set off the atomic engines of the boat, making it explode. Gibson and Xavier recognized an old language of frequency modulation the night before, heard about Farrell\u2019s crash, and landed the ship to help. It turns out that the expedition that left Terra for Sirius in 2171 perished soon, and the Bees brought the spacecraft here. They also brought some people from their peripheral colonies conditioned to believe themselves descendants of the expedition. They have been let alone. Farrell understands that the Bees were trying to monitor this group and understand humans\u2019 logic, but they never did. \n\n"}
{"id": "24949_2", "pid": "24949_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Farrell and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30824, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Navigator Arthur Farrell is part of the Terran Reclamations crew on the Marco Four ship. He is part of a three-man crew with a mechanical named Xavier. Farrell is also considered to be the youngest and most impulsive member of the crew; he also jumps to conclusions quickly and often gets corrected by either Stryker or Gibson. At the beginning of the story, Farrell is excited to go to the Alphard Six and almost forgets about the reconnaissance spiral. He tries to prove that the planet was never unreclaimed, even though the other two members are much more cautious in case there are traces left behind by the Bees. When they discuss what could be on the planet, Farrell continues to argue that the Bees never colonized Six. He also says that they might have all been the victims of a joint hallucination. He later volunteers to do the field work with Xavier, as he is sick of staying on the ship with either of the other two men. Farrell later goes down on the helihopper and goes past a hamlet when a blinding flare of electric discharge knocks him out. He later wakes up in an infirmary and believes he was taken by the enemy. However, as the medic leads him out, he realizes that these people are a result of one of the old ventures. Farrell mistakenly believes that the Marco Four is grounded too, which is why he runs to the ship and pushes a few buttons to take off. Later, however, he is reprimanded for his actions and explained that the people here mean no harm. "}
{"id": "24949_2", "pid": "24949_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Farrell and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30824, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Arthur Farrell is the navigator and the youngest in the Terran Reclamations crew aboard the Marco Four. He is described to be impatient and impulsive but eager. Assigned to investigate the unknown colony they encounter, he disembarks into a helihopper to determine the planet's origins and inhabitants. As he begins to pull back, he passes over a hamlet and the helihopper suddenly crashes as Farrell falls unconscious. \n\nWhen he awakens, he finds himself in an infirmary and presumes himself to be prisoner. Following the medic out of the infirmary, Farrell marvels at the succession of rooms like the hydroponics garden and nursery that convinces him that previous old ventures on colonization had indeed succeeded. However, he is worried his fellow crewmates have been captured as well. When he sees the grounded ship, his fears comes true and he impulsively rushes aboard the ship to fly them away. Stopped short by Stryker, he soon finds out that no one was shot down by the colony. Instead, Farrell himself had flown into an electrical line and knocked himself out. In addition, the colony was friendly and eager to return to Terra with the crew, as they had been hoping for a while. "}
{"id": "24949_2", "pid": "24949_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Farrell and what happens to him throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30824, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Farrell is the navigator on the spaceship Marco Four. He is the youngest and the most impulsive among the crew. He is also called Arthur. He attempts to planetfall the unobserved planet without scouting at first. He does not recognize the importance of the Reclamations Handbook. After getting struck, Farrell volunteers to investigate the planet and the primitive village. When they find out the damaged spaceship on the land uses continuous atomic fission to supply power, they are astonished. Farrell teases Stryker with the hypothesis that the people below are humanoid. Farrell uses the helihopper to investigate the land, with Xavier\u2019s scouter scouting ahead of him. When he reaches the field, he is struck by the power lines used to transmit electricity in the city and passes out. He is in an infirmary room when he wakes up, and an anachronistic man comes in. Farrell thinks that all the other crew members are captive when he sees their spaceship land with the port open. As all the assumptions become more apparent in his head, he dashes to the Marco Four and rises it up. Disrupted by Stryker, he drives the spaceship down again. Farrell learns from Stryker that all their hypotheses are wrong, and these people are harmless and primitive as they had thought."}
{"id": "24949_3", "pid": "24949_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Stryker and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Stryker is a crew member of the Marco Four, nominally captain of the group sent on a mission to locate the Terran slaves that were abandoned by the Bees. He seems experienced, calm, and disciplined, always following the Reclamation Handbook. Stryker has fought the Hymenops and spent a lot of time trying to understand their behavior. He values his team and doesn\u2019t want to risk them or their ship in the search for the unknown and, for example, was ready to pull Xavier back when they just detected the waves, fearing it could be something lethal. He appreciates Farrell\u2019s eagerness to find the new and enjoys bantering with him; he also respects other crew members, like Gibson and Xavier, and attentively listens to them when they discuss the origin of the atomic-powered ship. Stryker is intelligent enough to determine that this ancient ship couldn\u2019t have been constructed on this planet - it was brought from somewhere else.\n"}
{"id": "24949_3", "pid": "24949_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Stryker and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Lee Stryker is one of the other members of the Terran Reclamations crew. He is the one with experience fighting the Hymenops and always cautious of any remains of the enemy. Stryker is also very careful too, constantly citing lines from the Reclamations Handbook on the ship or to Farrell. He enjoys proving Farrell wrong as well, knowing how impulsive the younger member is in most situations. Stryker\u2019s cautiousness does come in handy, as they do get into an explosion later on while in the atmosphere of the Alphard Six. Even though he is very cautious and knowledgeable, there are times where he becomes impatient out of curiosity. However, Stryker is a lot more reasonable than Farrell, rushing to land the ship again after Farrell starts it. He takes the time to explain to Farrell about their current situation as well. "}
{"id": "24949_3", "pid": "24949_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Stryker and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Stryker is the captain of the Marco Four and the crew. He is described to be the most knowledgeable, not only in regard to the Reclamations Handbook but also first hand, as he had fought the Hymenops. Physically, he has a bare fringe and a fat face. \n\nHe is intelligent as he leads the crew in theorising multiple explanations for the explosion as well as the potential inhabitants of the planet they encounter, as well as later deescalating Farrell's fear later on in the story. "}
{"id": "24949_3", "pid": "24949_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Stryker and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30812, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Stryker is the captain of the Terran Reclamation crew Marco Four. He has a Reclamations Handbook that he constantly checks. He fought with the Bees before and learned that humans and the Bees, an alien species, would never understand each other. He is also called Lee by Farrell. He likes to tease Farrell, the youngest in the crew, to teach him the importance of abiding Reclamations Handbook for safety. He is tolerant and communicative that whenever Farrell acts impulsively or argues with other crew members, he will ease Farrell\u2019s irritation and negotiate the solution among different ideas from the crew members. He is rational and practical that when all crew members theorize the possible situation after being struck, he concludes that they should investigate the land first-handly instead of denying every hypothesis."}
{"id": "24949_4", "pid": "24949_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story begins on a spaceship called the Marco Four. It is working on Ringwave generators and hangs inside the orbit of a dun-colored moon of the green planet Alphard Six. This ship has several tools, including a magnoscanner, the Zero Interval Transfer computer, and a screen that shows the surface of the planet. Then Farrell gets on a helihopper and soon crashes. The next day he wakes up in an infirmary with white walls, tables, lockers, chests, and some unfamiliar chemical odor.  It is one of the rooms of the ancient ship located in the central square of the town on Alphard Six. Farrell then walks down a bare corridor with a metal floor and rare open ports that let in a flood of reddish sunlight. He goes through storage rooms, hydroponics gardens, a gymnasium, a nursery, and a power room. He also notices the Marco Four parked near the square.\n"}
{"id": "24949_4", "pid": "24949_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is initially set on the Marco Four, which is flying in the atmosphere of the Alphard Six. The ship has many controls, including a Ringwave generator, magnoscanner, and a Zero Interval Transfer computer. There is also an area for sleeping on the ship as well. Alphard Six itself is described to have a cool green disk and an airy jewel compared to the other areas. The planet itself is mostly uninhabited, but there is an island about three hundred miles in diameter that has signs of being habited. On the island, there are twenty-seven agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is also a city with a thousand buildings and a central square. There is also a primitive spaceship there as well. When Farrell awakens later, he finds himself on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary. The infirmary is cluttered with tables, lockers, and chests full of material. When the medic guides him later, Farrell sees storage rooms, hydroponics gardens, a small gymnasium, and a nursery. "}
{"id": "24949_4", "pid": "24949_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story is set within Alphard Six, one of the many inner planets. These planets have been explored, colonzied, and abandoned by Terrans, the Hymenops, and the Bees. Alphard Six is not unreclaimed nor uninhabited and are home to the Alphardians, who reside in hamlets on the planet. \n\nThis story also takes place on the ship, the Marco Four. It is where discussions between the crewmates occur as they debate the origins and potential inhabitants of Alphard Six. "}
{"id": "24949_4", "pid": "24949_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30798, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story happens on the planet Alphard Six. There are barren, desolated lands and swamplands on the planet. The planet looks uninhabitable except for a large island. Twenty-seven small farmhouses are surrounded by the cultivated fields on the island, surrounded by the forest. There is a city strewn with many buildings, the center of which is a square that rests a damaged spaceship of a size ten times larger than Marco Four. The damaged spaceship is used for the power supply in the city. Streets stretch out from the square in order."}
{"id": "24949_5", "pid": "24949_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Ringwave technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30816, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Ringwave technology allowed humans to explore the neighboring systems of planets, find new habitable territories, and colonize them. It also partially leads to the invasion of the Bees and allows humans to fight with them. The knowledge about the history of the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle, especially the fact that it was discovered in 2100, also helps the crew realize that the spaceship on planet Alphard Six is atomic-powered and thus prehistoric. It\u2019s eleven hundred years old, also Terran, and was brought here from somewhere else. \n"}
{"id": "24949_5", "pid": "24949_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Ringwave technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30816, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Ringwave technology is what both the Bees and humans put their faith in. Ringwave energy is said to be very reliable, capable of long-range travel. Compared to any primitive technology before, the Ringwave and its Zero Interval Transfer principle was the only way for any instantaneous communication. It has been around since 2100, completely replacing rocket propulsion because the principles were so much more advanced. Even on the Marco Four, there is a Ringwave board and Ringwave generators used for travel through space. It is significant both for the humans and the Bees because both species rely on it for exploration. When the Bees colonized and conquered the humans, they relied on this technology. During the reclamation crew\u2019s travels, they also used this technology to go to the different planets. "}
{"id": "24949_5", "pid": "24949_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Ringwave technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30816, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Ringwave technology is significant because it is what propelled Terrans forward in their technological pursuits and is what helps advance their generation. It is what allows them to pursue long-range travel and interstellar flight as the crew go about their reclamation journey. Additionally, this is the point of similarity between the Terrans and the Bees as they both rely on Ringwave energy fields over missiles as the choice weapon. \n\nIt is also significant because it highlights the difference between the Terrans and the Bees described and the Alphardians later discovered in the story. The Terrans and the Bees have access to such advanced technology that not only empowers their knowledge but their way of living, transportation, etc. In contrast, the Alphardians remain in the past with their comparatively archaic technologies and methods."}
{"id": "24949_5", "pid": "24949_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\n \n \n CONTROL GROUP\n \n\n By ROGER DEE\n \n\n The\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the Marco Four down at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had\u2014as\n was usual and proper\u2014no voice\n in the matter.\n \n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper\u2014 \"\n \n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world\u2014it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n \n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n \n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n \n \"And I think you live for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born\u2014neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n \n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n \n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n \n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added as usual . \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n \n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n \n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n \n \n \n \"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n \n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The Marco Four , Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n \n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n \n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\n \n \n \n Stryker looked dubious.\n\"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n \n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n \n Stryker was not reassured.\n \n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n \n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n \n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n\"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n \n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'\u2014we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n \n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n\"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n \n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n \n Gibson disagreed.\n \n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment\u2014the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point\u2014and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n \n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n \n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n\"then there's only one choice remaining\u2014they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n \n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture\u2014they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n \n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name are they?\"\n \n \n \n \"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all\u2014we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n \n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n \n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n \n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n \n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years\u2014the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors\u2014would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n \n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n\"It's high time I took my turn\u2014and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n \n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the Marco\n Four .\n \n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the Lament for Old Terra with\n your accordion.\"\n \n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n \n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n \n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n \n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n\"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n \n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear\u2014and\n as inflectionless\u2014as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the Marco Four .\"\n \n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n \n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n\"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n \n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n \n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\n \n \n \n Farrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n \n \" Continuous fission? Good\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n \n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n \n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end\u2014\"\n \n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib\u2014the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since\u2014how\n long, Xav?\"\n \n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n\"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n \n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk\u2014\n \n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get here ?\"\n \n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n \n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not\u2014\"\n \n \" Any problem posed by one\n group of human beings ,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \" can be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity .\"\n \n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\n \n \n \n He waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n \n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n \n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n \n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us how ,\n we're ready to move.\"\n \n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n\"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars\u2014our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\n \n \n \n Gibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n \n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000\u2014Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember\u2014and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n \n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship couldn't have made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary\u2014the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated\u2014\"\n \n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n\"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n \n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n \n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n \n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n \n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\n \n \n \n But uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n \n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs\u2014what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n \n Suppose, he thought\u2014and derided\n himself for thinking it\u2014one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures did succeed?\n \n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n \n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n \n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n \n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down\u2014\"\n \n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\n \n \n \n He awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n \n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n \n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n \n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n \n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better\u2014they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the Marco would be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n \n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n \n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n \n \"A creche ,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n \n One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before\u2014for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n \n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n \n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n \n The Marco Four , ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\n \n \n \n Farrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n \n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n \n He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n \n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n \n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n \n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n \n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the Marco Four down. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n \n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n \n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n \n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n \n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n \n \" Friendly? That torpedo\u2014\"\n \n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n \n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n \n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n \n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n \n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n\"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n \n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where did they come from?\"\n \n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n\"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n \n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here\u2014they\n still don't know where\n they really are\u2014by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n \n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n \n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n \n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n \n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal\u2014if obsolete\u2014background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n \n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n\"It's obvious enough,\n surely\u2014hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\n \n \n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Ringwave technology?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30752, "query_start_index": 30754, "query_end_index": 30816, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ringwave technology is an energy field used for the energy source of Macro Four, the Terran Reclamation spaceship. Both humans and the alien species, Hymenops or the Bees, possess the Ringwave technology. Before the invention of Ringwave\u2019s propulsion-communication principle in 2100, humans used atomic fission and rocket propulsion. However, only the Zero Interval Transfer principle and the instantaneous communication of Ringwave technology can make long-range interstellar travel possible. Since it was invented, the atomic fission stage in technology has long been abandoned for its destructive power and incapability to sustain long-range space travel. Therefore, when the spaceship is attacked by a seemingly guided missile, which can only be equipped with atomic technology, the crew members deny all the hypotheses of the possible situation of the unobserved planet based on the technological development and the necessary time taken. Ringwave technology is significant in that the crew members theorize or assume the situation on the unobserved planet based on its existence and technological development."}
{"id": "29159_1", "pid": "29159_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28566, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jon Karyl is bolting a new baffle plate on the stationary rocket engine and ignores what happens around other parts of the little asteroid. A peculiar spaceship lands a few hundred yards away from his plastic igloo, and a half-dozen steel-blue creatures slide out of the airlock. When he climbs up again and sees the creatures, Jon runs for the rocky slopes. Jon brings out his stubray pistol and turns up the oxygen dial for greater exertion as two of the creatures continue to chase him. He manages to elude them by going down a dim trail temporarily. Once Jon finds the stubby bush shaped like a Maltese cross, he keeps going until he reaches the hollowed-out space. He observes the steel-blue creatures from the televisor, noting how they head towards the station to try and destroy it. Although the station is not supposed to break because it is made out of stelrylite, the creatures pound holes into the station with round-headed metal clubs. He presses the atomic cannon\u2019s firing buttons and finds that it is impossible to damage the ship. Suddenly, a Steel-Blue paralyzes him from the waist down and tells him to come with them. Once outside, the Steel-Blue explains to Jon that the most protective metal they use is the softest one in their world. He follows the Steel-Blue into the ship, where a more massive one tells Jon\u2019s Steel-Blue to examine him and give him death. The Steel-Blue brings him to the examination room, where Jon is curious about this whole interaction. He thinks about warning the SP patrol and using his weapon, but his Steel-Blue tells him they are already aware of it. The other Steel-Blues begin reproducing the service station, and Jon\u2019s Steel-Blue tells him that his torture will be dissolved in a liquid they have prepared. When he goes inside, he prepares to blast at the cylinder with his gun. However, the tentacles take it away from him and bring him a glass-like cup filled with liquid. Jon toasts to Earth and drinks the liquid, going to sleep shortly after. When he awakes again, the Steel-Blues are amazed that he is still alive. On the fifth day, Jon breaks out of his plastic bowl with his subray because he is hungry. The Steel-Blues try to torture him more with the poison, and Jon has now made it a fetish to stay alive. When Jon takes the drink from No. 1, it tells him that the SP ship will be destroyed. Jon tries to send a distress signal, and he watches as the SP ship begins to come abruptly. The Steel-Blues watch as he tries to escape, only to be greeted by the voice of a space guard. Captain Ron Small of SP-101 tells him later that the Steel-Blues fed him a liquid they feared. The Steel-Blues tried to fight back, but the SP ship just shot a water rocket and set it on atomic fire. Captain Small and Jon then toast to water. "}
{"id": "29159_1", "pid": "29159_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28566, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows Jon Karyl, a service station attendant. While fixing something on the rocket engine, a landing peculiar blue ship escapes his attention. When he notices the intruders, he finds them to be steel-blue creatures intent on approaching and capturing him. Escaping away back to the service station, he fires atomic cannons at the creatures' ship only to watch it ricochet off. Suddenly, a Steel-Blue temporarily paralyzes his legs and instructs him to follow. Karyl finds out - through an exchange of mind-reading - that these Steel-Blues are just like Earthmen as they seek out further planets to inhabit. \n\nAnother Steel-Blue instructs Karyl's Steel-Blue to examine him and then torture him, leaving him to his death. Proclaimed to be a soft-metal creature, Karyl is instructed to enter a plastic igloo. This igloo is a reproduction of Earth's atmosphere, so the Steel-Blues can observe the torture. In it, Karyl is given a series of dilutions containing a liquid that dissolves metal, with the last tumbler containing the pure liquid. Though Karyl initially tries to escape using his stubray pistol, he becomes curious about death and drinks the liquid. To the Steel-Blues surprise, he survives the first night and all subsequent days as well, seemingly only suffering from a lack of food and nutrition. Karyl vows to stay alive until the SP ship can rescue him, but his Steel-Blue warns him that they will be ready to attack it when it comes. \n\nOn the sixteenth day, the Steel-Blues await Karyl to die as they give him the final undiluted liquid. Drinking it, Karyl laughs instead and taunts the Steel-Blues. Using a power-pack radio, he sends a warning signal to the SP ship. When it arrives, he stumbles out of the igloo and crawls until he hears a human voice. Later on in his recovery, he finds out that his warning was successful and that the liquid thought to be poison by the Steel-Blues was in fact water. Beneficial to humans, but harmful to robots. In fact, this is what the Captain of the SP ship used to attack the Steel-Blues. "}
{"id": "29159_1", "pid": "29159_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28566, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After he repairs the rocket engine, Jon Karyl, a starways\u2019 Lone Watcher, notices the invasion of Steel-Blues, extraterrestrial robotic creatures. He flees towards the service station while six Steel-Blues chase behind him. During his run, Steel-Blues use power rays to attack him but fail. He flees successfully into the service station, uses the televisors to spot the motion of Steel-Blues, and examines them. He realizes Steel-Blues are robotic. The pounding sound upstairs makes Jon realizes that Steel-Blues is trying to break the entrance door. He thinks Steel-Blues are doing a useless job as the strongest metal forms the service station in the solar system. He goes to the station\u2019s power plant to use the televisor that can see every room, but the Steel-Blue pounds a hole into the door, which seems impossible to him. He attacks the Steel-Blues\u2019 spaceship with an atomic cannon bomb, finding the bomb ricochet off the ship and strike the rocket nearby. Suddenly, he is taken down by the Steel-Blue, who invades the station when he tries to attack the ship the second time. Through the conversation with the invading Steel-Blue, Jon knows that they can read his mind when it is directed outward.\n\nAs Jon is taken to the Steel-Blues\u2019 ship, he learns that the toughest metal in the solar system is considered the most vulnerable one for Steel-Blues. He also knows that Steel-Blues\u2019 purpose in invading the solar system is to conquer more living spaces for themselves. In the Steel-Blues\u2019 ship, Jon sees the leader of the Steel-Blue, who orders Jon\u2019s guide Steel-Blue to examine Jon. After Jon is examined, they classify him as a soft-metal creature by him. Jon is taken to a prison to undergo the torture built by the Steel-Blue, forced to drink a liquid used to dissolve the metal. The Earth space patrol cruiser will come to refuel their ship after 21 days; Jon knows that he has to stay alive until then to alert the SP ship. During the torture, namely drinking the unknown liquid, Jon attempts to escape but fails. The Steel-Blues every day watch him undergo torture. At the beginning of the torture, the liquid is diluted and tastes like some strong acid. As the days pass, the diluted portion decreases, and Jon realizes what the liquid is. Finally, on the last day, when the SP ship is scheduled to come, and Jon is fed with the undiluted liquid, he realizes that it is water and the weakness of the Steel-Blues. He sends the message to the SP ship and then passes out outside the prison. When he wakes up, he is rescued by the SP ship, and the Steel-Blues is destroyed by the powerful water attack of the SP ship.\n"}
{"id": "29159_1", "pid": "29159_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28566, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows Jon Karyl, a lone watcher that lives in what seems to be an asteroid. He is in charge of watching and protecting the asteroid before other humans come. While doing this, an alien ship arrives on the asteroid. Jon is forced to run from his base while the aliens chase him. He manages to get to his secondary entry to the base without the aliens seeing. When he gets back to the base, he tries to shoot the enemy ship with a cannon, but he doesn\u2019t do any damage. Instead, the aliens manage to break into his base and capture him. Jon is taken to the enemy ship and he realizes that the aliens are in fact robots. The robots take him to their leader, where Jon is told that he will be tortured. Jon knows that there is another ship coming in 21 days, so he only has to survive for those days. The robots give Jon an acid that would slowly kill him, and Jon is forced to drink it. After a few days of this same routine, Jon escapes the ship using his blaster, as he is very hungry. He gets caught again and continues drinking the acid. When the human ship arrives, Jon manages to warn them about the robots. When Jon woke up from passing out, the humans had already destroyed the robots. It is revealed that they had been feeding Jon water and citric acid, thinking that it would kill Jon. "}
{"id": "29159_2", "pid": "29159_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the physical features of the Steel-Blue creatures?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28595, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Steel-Blue creatures are described to be steel-blue in color. They have egg-shaped heads and walking appendages. The Steel-Blues are also around the height of Jon at six feet, and their appendages are many-jointed. These appendages also stretch and shrink independent of each other, but the cylindrical body and tentacles are kept on a level balance. Instead of eyes, the Steel-Blues have elliptical-shaped lenses that cover half of the head and converge around the sides of the head. Jon notes that they are robots without masters. When Jon follows the Steel-Blue later, he notes that it has a lens on the back of its head as well. The massive steel-blue creature that Jon meets has four more tentacles, including two short ones that grow out of its head. "}
{"id": "29159_2", "pid": "29159_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the physical features of the Steel-Blue creatures?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28595, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "These creatures - robots - are steel-blue in nature with egg shaped heads. They stand at about six feet tall and have a rectangular-like stature with flexible appendages (able to move independently of each other), a cylindrical body, and ellipitcal-shaped lens for eyes that are present both on the front and back of their head. \n\nSome of the creatures, unlike Jon's Steel-Blue, also have more tentacles that also grew atop their heads. These tentacles were able to move like limbs, for example, it was able to grab the glass containing the yellowish liquid. "}
{"id": "29159_2", "pid": "29159_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the physical features of the Steel-Blue creatures?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28595, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Steel-Blue is around six feet high. Their head shape looks like an egg, colored Steel-Blue. Each has four pairs of independently jointed forked tentacles, stretching from their cylindrical body, which let them move. Their body shape is straight without the curve of the shoulder or hip. Elliptical-shaped lenses cover their heads for both the front and the back of their heads, whose ends wind around the side. They look like robots. They communicate with telepathy. The leader of the Steel-Blue, No. 1, is more massive than the normal ones and has four more pairs of tentacles, two of which are shorter and stretch out from its head."}
{"id": "29159_2", "pid": "29159_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the physical features of the Steel-Blue creatures?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28595, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The creatures are described as being of a steel-blue color. They are six feet tall, and they have egg shaped heads. They don\u2019t have any legs or hands, instead they have appendages that allow them to move. They are cylindrical, and have 4 tentacles that allow them to fight and grab things. Instead of eyes they have elliptical shaped lenses that allow them to see, and they also have lenses on the back of their head, which allows them to see. They also communicate with Jon via telepathy, and they can read his mind. "}
{"id": "29159_3", "pid": "29159_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28570, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is initially set on an asteroid, where a stationary rocket station is. Jon has a blue plastic igloo to live in. There is also a ravine where he runs to in an attempt to elude the Steel-Blues. There are bushes, water, and dense thicket that he must go through before getting to the hollowed-out space in the center. At the station, there is a lock for his key to go through. The lever then opens to a long tunnel, and there is a televisor that fixes on the area. The station is made out of stelrylite, but it becomes riddled with holes after the Steel-Blues attack. The station also has a row of studs and a revolving turret that fires atomic cannons. There is a yellow, blue, and red button to fire. The Blue Steels\u2019 spaceship can change its part to a bubble-like metal. The spaceship of the invaders is pitch-black and is a maze-like corridor. At the end, there is a circular room with bright light streaming from a glass-like and bulging skylight. In the examination room, the Steel-Blues build a miniature reproduction of the space station with plastic walls. There is a small opening in the four foot cylinder that brings him a strange liquid. Although the Steel-Blues are always present, the tank they keep him in is fairly easy to break out of. "}
{"id": "29159_3", "pid": "29159_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28570, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This setting occurs in the same system as Earth, inhabited both by humans and the Steel-Blue creatures. More specifically, this story takes place aboard the Steel-Blues' ship. Karyl encounters many rooms including the examination room, but the majority of the story has him in a clear plastic igloo by which is he observed by the creatures. The igloo is a miniature recreation of the service station with a lock outside. \n\nAt the end of the story, Karyl is saved and the setting changes to be onboard the Space Patrol ship, where he is safe and recovering."}
{"id": "29159_3", "pid": "29159_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28570, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story happens on an asteroid under the control of the earthman. The surface of the asteroid is rocky and uneven. The service station is underground of a ravine, whose surface is filled with man-high bushes. Its entrance is hidden underneath a dense thicket around the hairpin turn of the old watercourse. In the center of the hollowed-out space lies a self-sealing lock, which is the door of the entrance. Behind the door, there is a long tunnel, the end of which is a room surrounded by the televisors. A steel ladder leads to the station\u2019s power plant room, which is also equipped with televisors that can watch all the rooms in the station. There are weapons stored in the power room. The station is capped with a revolving turret. The outer shell of the service station, including the entrance door, is constituted by stelrylite, the toughest metal in Earthman\u2019s knowledge. The blue spaceship lies near the stationary rocket engine outside the service station.  Inside the blue spaceship, it is dark and mazed with corridors. There is a circular room lighted with a bulging skylight, where the leader of the Steel-Blues is. \n\nThe Steel-Blues build a smaller plastic igloo, similar to the one in the service station, to serve as the prison for Jon to torture him. There are instruments ranged inside, such as an air pump from the station and a pallet laid inside. The wall is made of clear plastic. The atmosphere inside is reproduced as the one in the service station, only with more proportion of the oxygen. There is a cylinder whose center can open, where it usually sits a glass tumbler containing a yellowish liquid that is claimed to be the harmful liquid to torture Jon. The cylinder is equipped with tentacles that can control Jon to drink the liquid and take down his defense.\n"}
{"id": "29159_3", "pid": "29159_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28570, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is located in a small asteroid that is described to be barren and empty, with gray rocks. The asteroid only has a single base, which is where Jon lives alone. There is also a ravine with plants that allow Jon to hide a secondary entry to his base, which is the one that he uses to get away from the steel-blues initially. When Jon gets captured, he is taken to the ship of the steel-blues, and he learns that they made a smaller replica of his base because they want him to die happily. "}
{"id": "29159_4", "pid": "29159_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the equipment used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28585, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jon uses a stubray pistol that he keeps on him at all times. The space station itself is fairly equipped, with a thin turret that can fire atomic cannons. The ship that the Steel Blues arrive in is very advanced as well, and it is capable of recovering from the cannon. The Steel Blue\u2019s build his habitat out of plastic and other material that they have in possession. When the Steel Blue\u2019s begin Jon\u2019s torture, they feed him a drink that he thinks is hemlock. Later, Jon also uses his little power-pack radio to send a distress signal to the SP ship. When the SP ship defeats the Steel Blues, they use a rocket tube to shoot water and then atomic fire. "}
{"id": "29159_4", "pid": "29159_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the equipment used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28585, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One equipment is the power-pack radio that Jon has. He uses it at the end of the story to send out call letters to warn the space patrol ship of the awaiting attack from the Steel-Blues. He continually sends the message as a distress signal, unable to receive a message back. \n\nAnother piece of equipment is Jon's stubray gun. Kept on him as a protective weapon, he first attempts to blast the cylinder with it. His attempt was unsuccessful as the Steel-Blue quickly apprehended it, before being returned to him. Later on in the story, Jon uses it to escape his plastic igloo prison. "}
{"id": "29159_4", "pid": "29159_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the equipment used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28585, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jon Karyl, a starways\u2019 Lone Watcher on an asteroid, is in a rocket when he notices the invasion of the Steel-Blues, non-terrestrial robotic creatures who try to invade the terrestrial territory. Jon Karyl also possesses a stubray pistol, which he often uses to break his way out of the prison, which the Steel-Blues make, or attack the Steel-Blues. When he flees from the Steel-Blues, he also wears a spacesuit, whose boots can control gravity pull. He takes off his spacesuit until he goes into the prison made by the Steel-Blues. Jon Karyl uses the televisors in the service station to spot the motion of Steel-Blues and the revolving turret to attack the Steel-Blues\u2019 ship. Jon wears a chronometer on his wrist to track the time, counting the remaining days of the arrival of the space patrol ship. He uses the power-pack radio to send the message to the space patrol ship on the day of their arrival."}
{"id": "29159_4", "pid": "29159_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the equipment used in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28585, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Both Jon and the Steel-blues use equipment throughout the story. First, Jon uses space boots and an oxygen dial when running from the steel-blues. The space boots allow him to control his gravitational pull, and the oxygen dial allows him to control the amount of oxygen that he is inhaling. Jon also uses a stubray pistol throughout the story to fight off the steel-blues and to escape from them. The steel-blues use black boxes to control different things. They also have smaller robots, which is what gives Jon the acid every day."}
{"id": "29159_5", "pid": "29159_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Jon Karyl and his Steel-Blue (the one that he initially meets)?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28632, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jon is initially curious about the Steel-Blue that he first meets in the space station. When he notices that it has eyes on the back of its head, it even says \u201cThank you\u201d to him. It also tells him that its species can read his mind. The Steel-Blue also explains to him that the metal they use at the station is considered to be the softest one from where the Space Blue\u2019s come from. It is not openly hostile towards him, but it does speak almost contemptuously when they go to the examination room. Although his Steel Blue initially did not show much hostility, it does warn him to not even think about contacting the SP ship or using his weapon. However, it does tease him and say that he gets absent-minded at times. When it tells him about the torture, his Blue Steel speaks in an almost-caressing way as well. When Jon breaks out of his tank to find food, his Steel-Blue tells him that it is the first of the creatures that he has met. It commands him to go back to the tank. Although it seems friendly at first, Jon and the Steel-Blue do not have any sort of positive relationship. The Steel-Blue wishes to see him suffer, while Jon wants to survive and get out of the torture room. "}
{"id": "29159_5", "pid": "29159_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Jon Karyl and his Steel-Blue (the one that he initially meets)?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28632, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between Karyl and his Steel-Blue is a tentative friendship, I would say. Both parties are curious about each other and seem more interested in learning about each other, rather than being vindictive like the No.1 Steel-Blue seems to be. For example, his Steel-Blue thanks Karyl when the latter comments on his innovative eyes on the back on his head. \n\nKaryl converses and interacts with his Steel-Blue the most, both in regards to the incoming SP ship as well as Karyl's apparent absent-mindedness. "}
{"id": "29159_5", "pid": "29159_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Jon Karyl and his Steel-Blue (the one that he initially meets)?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28632, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Jon Karyl, a starways\u2019 Lone Watcher, is in a controlled relationship with the Steel-Blue, an extra-terrestrial robotic creature that he first meets. He is stricken down by the Steel-Blue and taken by it to its spaceship. Jon is the captive and the watched prisoner of the Steel-Blue. When Jon tries to escape from his prison or the torture because of the unbearable hunger, the Steel-Blue forces him to go back and stay in the newly-built smaller igloo. Jon breaks one tentacle of the Steel-Blue by using his stubray pistol when he tries to resist it. The Steel-Blue suppresses Jon by showing the power of its weapon and forces him back to the prison. The relationship between them is superior and inferior, in the sense of being captive. "}
{"id": "29159_5", "pid": "29159_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\n  \n\n\n Jon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n \n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n \n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n \n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n \n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n \n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n \n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n \n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n \n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n \n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n \n He glanced back finally.\n \n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n \n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n \n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n \n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n \n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n \n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n \n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n \n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n \n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\n \n \n\n There\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n \n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n \n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n \n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n \n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n \n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n \n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n \n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n \n They were about the height of Karyl\u2014six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n \n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n \n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n \n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n \n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n \n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n \n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n \n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n \n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n \n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n \n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n \n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n \n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n \n The thin fin\u2014the cannon's sight\u2014split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n \n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n \n He pressed the red button again.\n \n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n \n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n \n He turned his head.\n \n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n \n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n \n \"I am\"\u2014there was a rising inflection in\n the answer\u2014\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n \n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n \n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n\"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n \n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n \n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n \n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n \n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled.\n \n \n\n Jon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n \n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you\u2014earthmen,\n is it?\u2014use it as protective\n metal.\"\n \n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n \n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n \n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n \n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n \n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n \n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n\"I couldn't understand.\"\n \n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n \n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n \n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n \n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n \n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n \n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n \n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n \n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n \n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n \n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n \n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n \n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n \n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n \n A green effulgence surrounded him.\n \n \n\n There\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n \n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n \n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n \n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n \n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n \n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n \n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n \n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n \n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n \n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n \n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n \n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n \n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n \n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n \n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n \n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n \n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get\u2014absent-minded,\n is it?\u2014every once in a\n while.\"\n \n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n \n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n \n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside\u2014one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station\u2014and they laid out a pallet.\n \n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n \n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n \n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n \n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n \n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n \n \"Enter your\"\u2014the Steel-Blue hesitated\u2014\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n \n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n \n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n \n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n \n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n \n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n \n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n \n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n \n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n \n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n \n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n \n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n \n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\n \n \n\n The\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up\u2014but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n \n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n \n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n \n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n \n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n \n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n \n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n \n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n \n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n \n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n \n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n \n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n \n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n \n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n \n One said,\n \n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"\u2014there was a hesitation\u2014\"as\n you say, died.\"\n \n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n \n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n \n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n \n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n \n Would this torture\u2014he chuckled\u2014last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n \n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n \n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n \n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n \n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n \n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n \n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n \n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n \n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n \n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n \n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n \n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n \n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n \n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n \n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n \n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n \n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n \n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n \n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n \n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n \n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders\u2014it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n \n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n \n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n \n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n \n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the\u2014ah\u2014hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n \n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n \n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n \n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n \n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n \n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n \n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\n \n \n\n Staying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n \n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n \n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n \n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n \n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n \n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n \n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n \n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n \n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n \n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n \n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n \n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n \n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n \n He sent out the call letters.\n \n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n \n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n \n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n \n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n \n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n \n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n \n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n \n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n \n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n \n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n \n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n \n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n \n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n \n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n \n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n \n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\n \n \n\n He was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n \n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n \n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n\"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n \n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n \n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n \n The space captain grinned.\n \n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with water to be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n \n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n \n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n \n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n \n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n \n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n \n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n \n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n \n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n \n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Jon Karyl and his Steel-Blue (the one that he initially meets)?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28524, "query_start_index": 28526, "query_end_index": 28632, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between Jon and the first steel-blue is that of capturer-victim. The steel-blue manages to break into Jon\u2019s base and captures Jon. After this, Jon uses the steel-blue to understand what the robots are and how they work. They communicate with each other, and Jon doesn\u2019t seem to be afraid of the steel-blue. Jon was very curious about the species, so he didn\u2019t want the robot in order to learn more about them. When Jon escapes from the torture, the same steel-blue captures him again and takes him back. "}
{"id": "29170_1", "pid": "29170_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22951, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows the protagonist, Hogey Parker\u2019s, journey in heading back home after a long stint in space. His identity leans heavily on being a spacer - or a tumbler - with distinguishing sunburned marks and glare-blinded eyes. Parker is accompanied by a bottle of gin, and with it, stumbles onto a bus. In his drunken ramblings and stumblings - attributed by himself to him being a spaceman - Hogey creates a ruckus on the bus and disturbs its passengers. Fellow passengers give him allowances as he\u2019s a spaceman and help him out. \n\nThroughout his journey, he is helped by various characters who further progress his journey back home. After being dropped off, the bus driver helps him across the road, where he is later then picked up by a farmer who drops Hogey off even closer to his farmhouse. In between, Hogey constantly looks up at the Big Bottomless space and thinks about his time in space with particular feelings of resentment and anger - one towards the sun for blinding him and another towards the rookie that replaced him. After finally making it close to his farmhouse, he sneaks through the grass past the fence and encounters the dog, who he quickly shushes when one of his wife\u2019s brothers comes out to investigate the noise. Staring at his wife and son through the house, he stumbles into wet concrete and quickly becomes stuck in the sand as it dries. Despite his best efforts he is unable to claw himself out. At the end of the story, his cries at being stuck in the concrete echo at the same time the cries of his son as the Hauptmann men find him, stuck. \n"}
{"id": "29170_1", "pid": "29170_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22951, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Big Hogey Parker, a tumbler who comes back to Earth from his nine-month stay in the space, can hardly behave appropriately on the bus because of his unaccustomedness to the gravity and the drunkenness. He harasses and annoys the passengers on the bus, gets warned by the driver, and sleeps on the rear seat of the bus. After the bus stop at Caine\u2019s junction, the bus driver helps him get out of the bus and safely cross the road. While crossing the road, Hogey talks about the importance of family and learns that the driver has two daughters. After crossing the road, the driver asks whether someone will come and pick Hogey up, but Hogey tells him that he is a week late and nobody will come. The driver tells him to wait for a car and leaves. Hogey stares at the sun while waiting, feeling unfamiliar with the gravity.\n\nHogey starts to lurch in the middle of the road. A car almost hits him when he fails to control his balance. A man comes out of the car and shouts at him. The man realizes that Hogey is Marie\u2019s husband through the conversation, so he drives Hogey to a place near Marie\u2019s house. Hogey takes a nap in the grass near the ditch until the night. He swallows a few gins, checks the time with the star's position in the sky as he pawns his watch in the poker game that he lost all of the money, and walks toward the house. He is afraid of facing his wife and son as he lost all the money in a poker game two weeks ago after his wife had waited for him for so long to do all the space travel to earn money. He wants to run away. He walks through the fence, trampling through some boards when the dog barks. He hides in the shadow of the peach tree when Marie\u2019s brother comes out to check. The dog comes at him, and Hogey calms the dog, waiting until the man goes inside the house. When Hogey keeps walking, he steps into a concrete mixer with sand and falls. He takes off his shoes and puts his bare feet back in the muddy sand. Laying on the sand, Hogey falls asleep. Past midnight, he gets awakened by the dog's licking, finding his feet stuck in the concrete. Reflecting on his time in the space and the people there, Hogey feels desperate. Suddenly, he hears his son cry. The cry brings Hogey\u2019s consciousness back from the space to where he is, and the significance of his family strikes him. He calls out loud for help and sobs with his feet stuck tight. He will live on Earth with gravity from now on.\n"}
{"id": "29170_1", "pid": "29170_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22951, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story focuses on a man named Hogey. Hogey is trying to return to his wife and child, but seems to find it very difficult because he has been drinking, and because his body needs to adapt to being back on Earth. The story begins in a bus, where Hogey is very drunk and is trying to talk to other passengers. The other passengers help Hogey sleep, but he wakes up again and continues speaking with others. When the bus reaches his stop, Hogey clumsily gets off the bus. When the driver sees that Hogey needs help, he helps Hogey sit down in the street and tells him to wait for a ride instead of walking to his wife\u2019s house. Hogey waits for a while, then decides to walk. He falls in a ditch, but he is helped by a couple who passes in a car. The man tells him that his wife remarried and that he is going to the new husband\u2019s house. After the man drops him off, Hogey falls asleep close to the house. He sleeps for a while and afterwards he tries to go into the house, but he struggles mentally to accept what he is doing. He ends up falling in cement, and his feet get stuck. We learn that Hogey worked in space a lot, and that he was afraid to go back to earth because of the amount of time that he had been away. \n\n"}
{"id": "29170_1", "pid": "29170_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22951, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Everybody immediately knows that Big Hogey Parker is a spacer and goes out of their way to help him even if he is harassing a housewife. He reveals that he was kidding about being an Indian, and there are two men who lead him back to his seat. When the driver threatens to turn him over, Big Hogey apologizes and sits in his seat until it is time to leave, and the driver asks if he is okay once he staggers to cross the highway. The man asks if somebody is supposed to meet Big Hogey, but he says that it is a surprise for everybody. He is redirected to sit at the culvert, but gravity makes it difficult for him to walk. As the sun sets, Hogey stares at it because he hates it for what it truly is and what it did to his eyes. A burly farmer angrily confronts him when he stumbles down the road again, but he reveals that he is married to Marie Hauptman. They offer to drop him off at the area near Hauptman's road, and Hogey finds himself too tired to go on because it is twilight. When he awakes again, it is night time. He takes another sip of his gin and decides how the meeting will go. Hogey is worried about the money, especially since he has gone on six hitches in space with the promise that each one would be his last one. As he goes near the house, a dog suddenly comes out and barks. One of Marie\u2019s brothers comes out to investigate the situation too, but he finds nothing and returns home with the dog. He tries to think about why a tumbler like him would be married with a son, and he finds both his feet losing the strength to move. The dog, Hooky, comes up to greet him again, but he angrily sends it away. Hogey thinks back to his crew, and a baby begins to cry suddenly. He yells for help, and the lights come on again because the baby begins to cry more. The kid had been an accident, and he knows that a tumblr has no business with a family. However, there is nobody to blame for this. Big Hogey sits with his foot locked in the solid concrete and sobs when the rest of the men find him. "}
{"id": "29170_2", "pid": "29170_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in concrete?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22986, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There is an ironic significance in Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in concrete. Throughout the story, Hogey\u2019s identity is tied to being a tumbler - a spaceman. Not only does he physically look like a spacer with his sun-burned marks from his goggles, he has also been blinded by the sun\u2019s glare. It is only due to these characteristics that other people give him allowances while Hogey is in a drunken stupor. \n\nHogey constantly speaks to separate himself from everyone else - even his wife - by identifying as a tumbler and them as hoofers. He insists that he was born as a tumbler and belongs in space, and hence blames his drunken inability to walk as due to a difficulty in adjusting to the gravity on Earth. He insists that he has to become a hoofer, but refuses to, and at the end of the story even denounces his wife and child. It is ironic then, that by Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in the concrete, he has reluctantly become a hoofer as his feet are literally encased in the Earth. \n"}
{"id": "29170_2", "pid": "29170_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in concrete?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22986, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Before Hogey\u2019s feet are stuck in concrete, he keeps thinking about his time in space, despising people who live on Earth as he believes the spacers know what truly lies behind the fake phenomenon of the sun and moon seen from the Earth. He doesn\u2019t realize the reality of living on Earth and the significance of his family. After Hogey\u2019s feet are stuck in concrete, he hears his son crying when he is lying on the ground and trying to get his feet out of the concrete. The crying of the firstborn reminds him of the reality that he will live on Earth, with gravity, in the future. There will be no more space travel for him but maybe his son. He used to blame his return on his son and the overall situation, but after being stuck in the concrete and hearing his son crying, he realizes that it is not anyone\u2019s fault that he is strongly influenced by the space life and fails to fulfill his responsibilities as a father and a husband. It is nobody\u2019s but his fault for all the things that happened. He feels belonging to Earth after his feet are physically stuck tight to the earth."}
{"id": "29170_2", "pid": "29170_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in concrete?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22986, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After struggling with going to the house, Hogey finally decides to approach. As soon as his ex-wife\u2019s brother appears outside, Hogey freezes and backs out of his plan of approaching the house. He seems to struggle a lot with the decision of either entering the house or not. After reconnecting with his dog, Hogey falls down, and his feet go into what seems to be muddy sand. Hogey doesn\u2019t seem to care and falls asleep with his feet still inside. He wakes up a few hours later with the dog licking him, and he realizes that he was actually stuck in concrete. This gives him no choice but to call for help from the house, and he ends up being found by the men of the house. \n"}
{"id": "29170_2", "pid": "29170_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in concrete?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22986, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hogey\u2019s feet being stuck in concrete shows that he has no chance to escape even if he wants to desperately. Throughout the entire story, he refers to himself as a tumbler with no place in a family. He battles with feelings of conflict for visiting his wife and child, believing that a tumbler has no right to a family. The concrete also forces him to confront his fears, even if he is not sure what he will say to Marie about money when he sees her. He contemplates leaving Hauptman's house a lot, but the concrete forces him to stay until he is found and brought back into the family. In a way, the concrete also makes him become a hoofer despite him constantly referring to himself as being different from everybody else. With his feet grounded to the earth, he has no choice but to also become a hoofer like everybody else. "}
{"id": "29170_3", "pid": "29170_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do the other humans (hoofers) help Hogey get home?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22975, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hogey gets home through the kindness of the hoofers, who all know him to be a spacer due to the white marks on his face. As such, when Hogey becomes rowdy and drunk on the bus, they gracefully pick him up and seat him down at the back of the bus. After getting off the bus, Hogey has trouble crossing the highway with all the passing cars and the bus driver compassionately helps him across the road. The driver even inquired about someone picking him up, before warning Hogey not to traipse through the hills alone and instead, wait for someone to come along. \n\nAs Hogey staggers down the pavement, he stumbles in front of a farmer\u2019s truck. Since the farmer recognizes Hogey\u2019s residence and identity, he helps Hogey get closer to his destination and drops him off right on the road in front of Hauptman\u2019s place. \n"}
{"id": "29170_3", "pid": "29170_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do the other humans (hoofers) help Hogey get home?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22975, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The bus driver helps Hogey get out of the bus and cross the road safely when Hogey staggers around the bus. He also asks Hogey\u2019s about his plan of getting home, warning him not to walk home but wait until a car comes for the safety reason. A farmer, who picks Hogey up in the middle of the road, drives Hogey to a place near Marie\u2019s house. The farmer helps Hogey get in and out of the car when Hogey can hardly hold himself straight. The farmer does not check if Hogey can stand upright after leaving him alone by the road."}
{"id": "29170_3", "pid": "29170_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do the other humans (hoofers) help Hogey get home?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22975, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout his journey, Hogey needs help from others in order to get back to his house. First, he is helped while he is on a bus. Here Hogey was very drunk and annoying the bus passengers, so some men put him in the back rows so that Hogey could sleep through the journey. After Hogey arrives at his stop, the bus driver helps him get off the bus and helps him cross the street. He also makes sure that Hogey waits for someone at the entrance of his side road instead of walking the 3 miles that divide the highway and Hogey's house. Lastly, Hogey gets help from a couple who give him a ride to the house. They seemed to be very familiar with his wife and her new husband. "}
{"id": "29170_3", "pid": "29170_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nHow do the other humans (hoofers) help Hogey get home?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22975, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "On the bus, the other humans help him by tolerating his presence and helping him get back to his seat. They make allowances when he staggers around the bus, and the other people even try to get the housewife that he was harassing to sit and talk to him. Two men help him to the back of the bus, and they dump him in the rear seat to tuck his gin bottle safely out of sight. When Big Hogey falls asleep, the driver wakes him up at Caine\u2019s junction and retrieves his gin bottle to give to him. Even though the driver is annoyed, he does help Big Hogey to go sit at the culvert until he gets a ride. Later, one of the farmers drives by and is initially angry at him. However, once he realizes that Hogey is married to Marie, he offers to give him a ride. They drop him off near Hauptman\u2019s road so that he can return home safely. "}
{"id": "29170_4", "pid": "29170_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the difference between a tumbler and a hoofer.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22976, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A tumbler and a hoofer are considered to be two types of people, as described by Hogey\u2019s drunken ramblings. A tumbler is someone who lives in space and never interacts with gravity. As such, a tumbler is often clumsy and has limbs that flail about. In addition, a tumbler is not meant to be a family man, and should neither have a wife nor children. \n\nTherefore, a hoofer is a person who lives on Earth and is rooted to the ground by gravity, as they have never traveled to space. By contrast, they would have a family, like Marie Parker does with her son. In addition, the hoofers in this story are stable and kind, like the farmer and the bus driver, who all help Hogey when his limbs and center of gravity fail him. \n"}
{"id": "29170_4", "pid": "29170_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the difference between a tumbler and a hoofer.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22976, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A tumbler is a person who lives in space, where there is no gravity. They may fear to be in an open space as a result of staying in the outer space too long. Their legs are not used to the gravity, which makes them hard to walk properly on Earth. They can naturally equate time to position. They have bad visions because their eyes are harmed by the direct contact to the sun. Their faces are harmed by the direct exposure to the sun in the space. Sun looks brightly pain and white to them as they see it in the bottomless dark space where sun is the largest source of light. A hoofer is a person who lives on Earth where there is gravity. They are used to walk with gravity, unlike a tumbler. Sun looks red to them when it sets. Their visions are not harmed by the direct exposure to the sun, neither are their faces."}
{"id": "29170_4", "pid": "29170_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the difference between a tumbler and a hoofer.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22976, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Hoofers are humans that have stayed on Earth all their life. They are everyday humans that live their lives without ever going to space. The bus driver, and Hogey\u2019s wife are examples of Hoofers. Tumblers on the other hand are people that have traveled to space, and worked there. Hogey is an example of a tumbler, and is an example of all the problems that tumblers face when they go back to Earth. Tumbler\u2019s aren\u2019t allowed to have children, a rule that Hogey broke. Hogey also struggles a lot with Earth\u2019s gravity, because tumblers spend a lot of time in space in which there is no gravity. "}
{"id": "29170_4", "pid": "29170_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the difference between a tumbler and a hoofer.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22976, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A hoofer is an ordinary human who lives on Earth. They do not go to space at all, and they spend their lives on the planet. Everybody who Big Hogey meets on his way home is considered to be a hoofer because they have never been to space before. Compared to being a hoofer, a tumbler is somebody who has spent most of their time in space. People, like Big Hogey, find it difficult to adjust to gravity after having spent so much time away from Earth. The tumblers are also not meant to have a family, as fathers are not supposed to be allowed into space. The hoofers, on the other hand, can have regular families and go about their daily lives because they do not have to abide by the same requirements as the tumblers have to for their line of work. The tumblers also go on multiple space hitches, despite the promise of money. "}
{"id": "29170_5", "pid": "29170_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22956, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes place on Earth. As we are following the protagonist\u2019s journey home, the setting constantly changes in terms of transportation mode and the landscape. First, we can identify the setting as a public bus, where Hogey occupies the back seats of the bus as he falls asleep clutching his gin. Hogey gets off at his stop - Caine\u2019s junction - which is a road junction with just a few farmhouses at the side and a derelict filling station. There is also a ditch, which he promptly stumbles into. The landscape reveals the Great Plains country, with descriptions of the setting being treeless and barren, and instead being full of rolling hills and fields of grass.\n\nTowards the end of the story, the setting changes to the Hauptman\u2019s place where the farmhouse sits off the side of the road with a barbed-wire fence. Within the tall grass of the farmhouse also lies a sloppy heap of sand - concrete. \n"}
{"id": "29170_5", "pid": "29170_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22956, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "It is in late August. The first scene is on a bus. After the protagonist gets out of the bus, he sits at a road junction. Along the side of the road, there is gravel. Next to the railroad tracks, a freight building, several farmhouses, and a filling station stand across the road. The land is barren, unwooded, and rolling. The hills around are dusty. There is a ditch along the road, the bottom of which is wet and muddy. The protagonist\u2019s house is about three miles from there. A wheat field and a few trees surround the house. Beyond the ditch next to the road, a tall grass lies. Six miles away to the west, there is a rocket launching station. A narrow path along with the barbed-wire fence leads toward the house. The hedge divides the peach trees from the field inside the fence gap. Some old boards, a shovel and pick, a sand pile, a stack of new lumbers, and a concrete mixer lie on the ground. There is a porch light next to the screen door of the house. "}
{"id": "29170_5", "pid": "29170_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22956, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story takes place on Earth. It starts off in a bus, and then it continues to be set in what seems to be a side road off a highway. Hogey is on his way to his house, which is described to be isolated, like a farmhouse. The house is big and has dogs, which make it more similar to a farmhouse. Hogey also remembers his time in space, which was described as a floating station full of tubes and metal machines that continued falling, and the people inside fell with it. The story seems to be set in the future, but it could very well be set only a few from now. "}
{"id": "29170_5", "pid": "29170_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nA wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\n \n\n\n  the hoofer\n \n\n by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\n \n\n\n\n  A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do\u2014if his heart cries out for a home?\n \n\n They all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n \n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n \n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n\"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n \n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n \n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n \n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n\"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n \n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n\"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n \n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n \n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n \n \"Never mind.\"\n \n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n \n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n \n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n \n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n\"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n \n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n \n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n \n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n \n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n \n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n \n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n \n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n\"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler\u2014 huk! \u2014only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n \n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n \n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n \n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n \n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n \n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n \n \" Huk! \u2014who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n\"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n\"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore\u2014woo- hoo !\u2014is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n \n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n \n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n\"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n \n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n\"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n \n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n \n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n \n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n \n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n \n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n \n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n \n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n \n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n \n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\n \n \n \n With a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n \n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n \n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n \n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n \n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n \n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n \n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n\"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n \n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n\"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say\u2014\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n \n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n \n \"Well, I'll be\u2014! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n \n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n \n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n\"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say\u2014eh,\n Martha?\"\n \n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n\"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n \n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n \n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n \n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n \n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n \n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n \n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n \n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown\u2014probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n \n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close\u2014close\n to home and woman and child.\n \n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n \n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n \n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same: One more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake\u2014enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\n \n \n And she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n \n \" Why? \" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n \n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n \n They're hoofers, that's all\u2014just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means\u2014God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n \n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n \n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n \n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n \n \" Shhh! \" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n \n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n \n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n \n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n \n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n \n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n'im.\"\n \n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n \n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy\u2014here!\"\n \n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n\" Rrrooff! \" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n \n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n \n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n \n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n \n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were\u2014his woman,\n his son.\n \n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n \n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went squelch and\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n \n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud\u2014sticky sandy\n mud.\n \n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n \n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n \n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n \n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer\u2014well, it added up.\n \n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n \n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n \n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n \n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n \n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n \n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n \n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light\u2014the space station\u2014rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was\u2014Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n \n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while\u2014rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes\u2014all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\n \n \n \n Everything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that all ways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n \n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n \n It was a baby crying.\n \n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n \n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n \n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n\"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n \n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n \n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\n  Make the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\n \n \n But that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n \n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n \n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n \n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to little Hogey.\n \n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22909, "query_start_index": 22911, "query_end_index": 22956, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Earth and on a bus. Hogey initially sits next to a housewife on the bus, but he is moved to the back after. There is a highway near the area where Hogey is dropped off, and he falls into a ditch when the sun goes down. There is a farm road to go into, and a side-road for cars to turn onto. At Hauptman's road, there is a narrow drive that leads to the barbed wire of the farmhouse. There is also a peach tree next to the house, and a porch. Eventually, Hogey gets himself stuck in concrete. There is a pile of wood boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and a shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of freshly-turned earth, and a concrete mixer near the area that his feet are stuck inside of. "}
{"id": "41562_1", "pid": "41562_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edward Loyce spends the whole day repairing the foundation. When he drives past the town park, he sees a thing hanging under the lamppost. He realizes that it\u2019s a hanging human. Ed is frightened because of the hanged body and because everyone seems to not care about it. People walk past and ignore it. Ed tells the owners of other shops, trying to figure out the situation. However, both the owners think it is normal. After realizing he is the only one who feels strange, Ed gets closer to the hanged body, noticing that it\u2019s a stranger. He bumps into Jenkins, a stationary clerk. Through the conversation with Jenkins and the jewelry store owner, he realizes that he is the only normal person in the town. He shouts to get the police, makes his way through the crowd, and finally gets into the police\u2019s car.\n\nWhen he tries to understand the situation from the police, he realizes that the police are fake because he knows every cop in the town. He escapes from the fake police. When he gets closer to the police station, he sees a swarm of alien flies landing on the roof of City Hall and flying inside of the building, disguising themselves as men coming out of the City Hall. Ed realizes that they are aliens from other dimensions trying to control the humans and already control the minds of town people, except for him, as he escapes from it when repairing the foundation. He cautiously leaves and takes the bus. People on the bus are mind-controlled. A man with a book is looking at him, and Ed guesses the identity of the seemingly mind-clear man. When another older man ascends the bus and looks at the man with the book, Ed realizes the strangeness and escapes from the bus. Two men come after Ed, and Ed kills the man with the book and runs away. A doubt about killing the wrong person flashes through his mind, but he has no time to think.\n\nHe tells his wife to get ready to leave when he gets home. He picks up a butcher knife and explains everything to his wife. When the twins come down, he sees a baby alien fly come toward him. Ed kills the alien, abandons his dazed wife and child, and flees. He runs ten miles towards Oak Grove. He explains everything to the Commissioner. The Commissioner records and agrees with his saying. Ed talks about his theory of the alien, but he cannot figure out the purpose of the hanged body. Finally, the Commissioner tells him that it is bait to lure people like him who escape successfully. Ed is frightened and realizes that he will be hanged in Oak Grove, just like the hanged body in Pikeville. That evening, Clarence Mason, the vice president of the Oak Grove Merchant\u2019s Bank, sees a hanging object under the telephone pole in front of the police station.\n"}
{"id": "41562_1", "pid": "41562_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows a regular man named Ed. The story follows Ed as he goes from his house to a shop that he owns. On his way there, he sees a dead body hanging from a tree in the town square. When he tells his coworkers, no one seems to understand the true implications of the hanging body, and Ed is the only one that takes it seriously. Ed starts to ask his coworkers why they are taking the hanging body so well, and Ed ends up being arrested by the town\u2019s police. In the police car, Ed tries to explain his reaction to the policemen. He realizes that they aren\u2019t real policemen, as Ed already knew every policeman in the town. Ed manages to escape and tries to head back home. While running, he sees a swarm of large alien-like bugs. He learns that they can control humans and imitate their actions. After seeing this, he gets on a bus and realizes that almost everyone in the bus is being controlled by the bugs. He also sees 2 people that seem different. He escapes the bus and is followed by the 2 same men. He gets into a fight with them and ends up killing one of them with a rock, thinking that they were controlled by bugs. He runs to his house to get his family and escape the town, but when he gets there he realizes that they were already being controlled by the bugs. He kills one of his sons and escapes alone. He gets to another town where he tries to explain everything to a police officer, but the police officer seemed very calm after everything that Ed had said, and the same cycle continues when another man finds a hanging body again."}
{"id": "41562_1", "pid": "41562_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed Loyce goes to his TV store at five o\u2019clock, and he is tired from digging dirt out of the basement. He stops his Packard at a red light while observing other people; the store has been open without him all day. There is no place to park in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE, but he does a shapeless dark bundle swinging a little from the wind. As he brings his car around, he realizes that it is a human body. Loyce tells his co-workers Don Fergusson and Jack Potter about the body, but they seem untroubled about it. Nobody pays attention to the body, and Loyce feels sick. He bumps into Jenkins and Margaret Henderson, both who assume that he is sick because of his reactions. Two cops show up, and they tell him that he missed the announcement earlier today. As he gets into the police car, he realizes that they weren\u2019t cops in Pikeville. Loyce manages to get away, stopping at the entrance of an alley. He heads towards the City Hall and sees fluttering shapes from the sky. The shapes are similar to giant insects with wings, and he wonders if there are more. Loyce realizes that they are aliens with the ability to change into man, and he boards a bus to get out of the area. Everyone seems fairly normal, but he notices a man watching him with shrewd eyes. He rushes out of the bus, and the man follows him. Loyce strikes the man with a rock and runs away as other people begin to gather. Janet asks what is happening when he returns him, and he tells her that the entire town is under control of the aliens now. The twins are called down, as Loyce tells him that they are going on a ride. Suddenly, there is a buzz and one of the aliens that bears a resemblance to Jimmy hurls itself at him. Loyce stabs it, realizing that his wife and other son are also controlled because of how expressionless they are. Eventually, he reaches Oak Grove and talks to the Commissioner. The Commissioner explains that he thinks this has been going on for a long time, and Loyce thinks about the man he accidentally killed. It turns out that the dead man was bait to draw out who had escaped, and the Commissioner tells him to come along as there is no time to waste. The last thing Loyce sees is a telephone pole and a rope on the street in front of the police station. The story then cuts to Clarence Mason preparing to go home after a long day working in the vaults. However, he notices a shapeless thing that looks like an ominous bundle hanging. He finds it strange that nobody else has noticed it. "}
{"id": "41562_1", "pid": "41562_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30247, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ed Loyce is the owner of a TV sales store. After a day of digging in his basement, he decided to drive to his store in the evening. While searching for a parking spot, he notices some bundle hanging from a lamppost in a town park, not far from his store. Moments later, he realizes it\u2019s a human body. Loyce is shocked and starts asking his salesman Don Fergusson about the body but gets an indefinite answer. Jack Potter, a shoe shop\u2019s employee, also calmly states that there has to be some valid reason behind it. Don goes back to work, surprisingly unbothered. Ed walks to the park to look at the dead man: not a local, his skin is cut gouged. Ed then meets a clerk named Jenkins, who asks why Ed looks sick. Loyce becomes hysterical, and people start gathering around him, wondering why someone is screaming. Two cops detain him and decide to drive Ed to the Hall of Justice. They start asking questions: his name, where he was during the day. Ed knows they are not real policemen - he knows all the cops of Pikeville - and eventually jumps out of the car when it slows down. He runs away and then sees a splotch of darkness above the City Hall and some alien figures coming through this slit. They can disguise themselves as men. He gets on the bus and inspects the other passengers - they seem to be under the influence of the alien creatures. Two men look at Ed with suspicion, and he quickly gets off the bus. He kills one of them with a rock while running away. Ed comes home and orders his wife and kids to get ready to leave the town immediately. His younger son seems to be under the control of a small alien. Ed stabs the creature, killing it. His wife and the other son are not reacting - they are subservient to the aliens, too. Ed runs away alone. He gets to a patrol station after crawling and limping for ten miles. The station\u2019s attendant hears Ed\u2019s story and looks confused. Loyce asks the man to get him to Oak Grove. Later, he tells his story to the Commissioner of Oak Grove, the officer believes him. Ed suggests that these creatures have been inhabiting the planet\u2019s towns for a long time. He thinks the Jewish people defeated them and showed it in the Bible, illustrating Beelzebub as a giant fly, an alien insect. The Commissioner then explains that the dead body probably served as bait for people who were not yet under the aliens\u2019 control. He asks Loyce to come with him somewhere. In the next scene, the vice president of the Oak Grove Merchants\u2019 Bank leaves work after spending the day in the vault, examining deposit boxes. He suddenly sees a dark bundle hanging in front of the police station. \n"}
{"id": "41562_2", "pid": "41562_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edward C. Loyce, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30274, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edward C. Loyce has been the owner of the TV sales store in the town for twenty-five years, and he is also called Ed by the town people. He is forty years old, living at 1368 Hurst Road, Pikeville. He has a wife, Janet, and twin sons, Jimmy and Tommy. He owns a Packard. He is practical and always tries to correct wrong things. He is friendly because he knows everyone in the town, and everyone seems to have a good relationship with him. Ed is brave because when he realizes that nobody pays attention to the hanged body in the town park, he gets closer and tries to figure out who the corpse is. Ed is also brilliant because he grasps the abnormal situations immediately after noticing the difference between the current situation and the normal one and because he sees the alien\u2019s power flaws right after knowing the situation. He is also practical because he plans what he should do right after grasping the situation in the town. He is cautious as he kills the man with the book on the bus, not letting the aliens' slight chance get him. His will is formidable because he runs with his feet for ten miles along the rough ground to escape from Pikeville and because he makes the decision immediately when he knows that he has to abandon his family."}
{"id": "41562_2", "pid": "41562_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edward C. Loyce, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30274, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edward C. Loyce is a man who lives in a small town, and is the owner of a TV sales store. He seems to be very intelligent, determined and can handle himself in a fight. Once Ed is put in a situation in which he is in danger, he immediately starts to think about what he can do to survive. He did this in the police car, in the bus and in his house when he had to kill one of his children. He is also described as a practical man. "}
{"id": "41562_2", "pid": "41562_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edward C. Loyce, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30274, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edward C. Loyce is the owner of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICES. He is married to his wife Janet; he also has two twin sons named Jimmy and Tommy. Loyce is described to be a forty year old man. He is also a very brave person, being unafraid to stab the alien that hurled itself at him even when it bore a vague resemblance to his son. He also chose to act quickly after seeing the aliens go to the City Hall. Loyce is also very perceptive as well, realizing that the two cops weren\u2019t actually cops because he knew every cop in Pikeville. Even though he is very perceptive, it can cause him to become overly-paranoid as he accidentally killed one of the other men who escaped the alien control because he suspected that the man was one of the aliens. He is shown to love his family very much, choosing to go back for them in hopes that the whole town is not completely controlled yet"}
{"id": "41562_2", "pid": "41562_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edward C. Loyce, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30274, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edward C. Loyce is a forty-year-old citizen of Pikeville. He owns Loyce TV sales and service store. At the beginning, we learn that he is a practical person. He is friendly and approachable, many people know him and his store, and he\u2019s also met every police officer in the town. He is terrified by death and instantly starts looking for something that could explain a dead body hanging from a lamppost. He\u2019s also quite shrewd and good at pretending. We see that, when he manages to deceive two cops and escape after he realizes that they are not real police officers. He also shows his intellect when sharing his assumption regarding the creatures and referencing the biblical image. He cares for his family and tries to take them with him, to hide them from the alien creatures but is then forced to leave them. \n"}
{"id": "41562_3", "pid": "41562_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the hanged human body play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30272, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The hanged human body is bait to lure people who escape successfully from the mind control of alien flies and draw themselves out. People who are not under mental control would try everything they can to escape from the controlled town to the nearby uncontrolled town, but when they arrive in the uncontrolled town, they will be hanged as another bait in the new town, just like what happens to Ed Loyce in the story. When Ed notices the hanged body in the park and the strangeness that nobody cares about, he tries everything to alert people and escape. Yet, he ends up being suspended by the Commissioner in the town nearby as a new bait to lure people like him. The fact that the uncontrolled person escapes from the controlled town is also why the hanged body looks like a stranger in a town because the person often comes from another town. This fact also constitutes why the body is caked with mud, and its clothes are torn and ripped because it is the consequence of a long journey from another town to where it is hanged."}
{"id": "41562_3", "pid": "41562_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the hanged human body play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30272, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The hanging body is an important part of the story because it is what tells Ed that something is wrong with the people around him. When Ed sees the hanging body in the middle of the town square, he tries to tell everyone around that something is wrong, but no one seems to care. At the end, Ed figures out that the body was used by the aliens to lure out the humans that they hadn\u2019t controlled yet, which is exactly what happened to him. Also, it is insinuated that Ed was killed and hanged in another town to repeat the same cycle again. "}
{"id": "41562_3", "pid": "41562_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the hanged human body play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30272, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The hanged human body is supposed to be a bait for the aliens to figure out who has escaped their control. As an escaped person would not have received the announcement that there was a body being hanged, it would allow them to better capture the escaped person. The hanged human body is also implied to be another person who escaped, because Clarence Mason also sees a body that is hanging. Since both Ed Loyce and Clarence Mason had a freak chance of not being infected by the aliens, because they were not present for the so-called \u201cannouncement\u201d of the hanged body, it also makes them targets. For Loyce, the hanged body is the start of his observation of the aliens and realization that the entire town is under control. \n"}
{"id": "41562_3", "pid": "41562_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the hanged human body play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30272, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This body serves as bait to help the alien insects find people that are not yet under their control. The body draws Ed\u2019s attention, and eventually, he gets taken by the aliens disguised as police officers. It helps him initially realize that something has changed the town's citizens. He soon finds out that Pikeville has been invaded by some aliens. At the end, we also learn that this hanging man was probably a citizen of some nearby town who, just like Loyce, managed to escape the alien insects and come to Pikeville to get help. These insects have invaded more than one city. They kill survivors to make them serve as baits for future survivors. "}
{"id": "41562_4", "pid": "41562_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the alien flies, and what are their characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The alien flies have multi-lensed inhuman eyes, wings, and a stinger. They are dark, coming from another dimension. They look like giant insects in their original form. When they move, they will produce a buzzing sound. They can mimic the appearance of humans, and they can control human minds. However, their mind control ability has its limit that they can control one area at one time, starting from the highest authority and widening down the control in a circle. When they control the whole town, they move to another area to continue. Their power flaw makes them unable to control everyone that someone may be overlooked. When that is the case, they set up a trap, using people who escape from the controlled town as bait to hang them in public, to lure people who are not under control to come to them by themselves. They anticipate their failures and are smart enough to make up for their flaws."}
{"id": "41562_4", "pid": "41562_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the alien flies, and what are their characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The alien flies are the creatures that invaded Ed\u2019s town and started to control everyone. They entered the town above town hall through a portal-like chasm in swarms. They were described as large bugs, with human characteristics. They could easily imitate humans, which is why it was hard at first for Ed to distinguish who was who. They are described as violent and fearless, but they weren\u2019t omnipotent. They made mistakes when controlling people, which is what allowed Ed to initially be free of their control. "}
{"id": "41562_4", "pid": "41562_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the alien flies, and what are their characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The alien flies are a strange type of species that have come in hopes of controlling the entire town. The Commissioner says that he has a theory of who they are. Most of the alien flies try to take over one area at a time, starting from the highest level and working down to widen the circle. Eventually, they move to a different town once the one they are currently controlling is firmly in their grasp. This has also been happening for thousands of years. Physically, they are giant insects with wings, capable of blending in as pseudo-men. When the one that resembles Jimmy attacks Loyce, he notes that it has wings and cold in-human eyes. There is also a stinger when it turns its body. The alien flies are dedicated to carrying out their mission of controlling the entire town. They do not have any personal emotions, but they are willing to get rid of any obstacle that stands in their way. The flies are very intelligent too, capable of mimicking humans almost perfectly and using bait to draw out the escaped ones. "}
{"id": "41562_4", "pid": "41562_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are the alien flies, and what are their characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The alien flies are some unknown creatures that came to Pikeville through a slit in the shell of the universe and occupied the town\u2019s citizens\u2019 minds and bodies. They have been doing this for thousands of years - Ed remembered their image was in the Bible. They are smart and can disguise themselves as humans. They also can anticipate their own mistakes and create certain mechanisms to locate people whose minds they haven\u2019t yet invaded. For example, they hang dead bodies in the central part of a town. This image can disturb only ones who are not aware of the aliens. \n\n"}
{"id": "41562_5", "pid": "41562_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30250, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story happens in Pikeville town and Oak Grove town. The first scene occurs in the town park where the hanged body is. In the park, there is a lamppost, a drinking fountain, and a bench. Under the lamppost, the body is hanged. The second scene is in the car, where Ed has a conversation with the fake police. When Ed escapes from the fake police, he runs into a hardware store filled with customers and clerks. There is a back door in the shipping room, a garbage can next to the door, and concrete stairs outside the store towards the top of the fence. The other side of the fence is an entrance to an alley, which is filled with boards and ruined boxes and tires. Passing the loading platform of a grocery store stands one wall of the Hall of Justice. The wall is white with barred windows. The City Hall is next to the police station, with yellow wooden walls with brass cement steps. Cedars and flowers are planted on each side of the entrance. \n\nWhen Ed gets on the bus, the people sitting around him are all dull, tired, and quiet. No one pays attention to him. People seem to be normal: one is reading the newspaper, another with business suits sits quietly, and the other gazes absently towards the front. When Ed escapes from the bus, he runs into a residential district, pavement sides with tall apartment buildings and lawns. \n\nWhen Ed comes home, there are windows with shades in the living room. The house is a two-floor building. The twin\u2019s room is upstairs. There is a basement in the house. In the kitchen, a butcher knife lies in the drawer under the sink. On his way to Oak Grove, rough ground, gullies, open fields, and forest are along the way. \n\nIn Oak Grove, there is a gasoline station and drive-in. Several trucks park there\u2014some chickens on the field and a dog tied with the string. In front of the police station in Oak Grove, a telephone pole is suitable to hang a human body.\n"}
{"id": "41562_5", "pid": "41562_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30250, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in a small town named Pikeville. The town is described as very small, composed of a town center with a square. The town\u2019s town hall is where the aliens\u2019 portal was, so it was covered by a swarm of them. The town also has different streets and highways, which Ed needs to take in order to leave the town. He ended up crawling out of the town because he didn\u2019t want to be seen, and he ended up hurt and scratched because the town had a lot of shrubbery and plants. "}
{"id": "41562_5", "pid": "41562_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30250, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is first set in Pikeville, where Ed has spent the day digging dirt out of his basement and wheeling it into the backyard. His television store is also located in the town, where there are many other commuters. There is a little square of green in the center of the street that serves as the town park. The park also has a lonely drinking fountain, bench, and single lamppost. The dead body hangs from this lamppost. The town also has a Hall of Justice, City Hall, and police station. The Hall of Justice has barred windows and a police antenna. The City Hall, however, is an old-fashioned yellow structure of good, gilded brass, and cement steps. There are also buses that take commuters back home after the day. Loyce\u2019s home has a living room, upstairs, kitchen, and basement. Later, the scene changes to Oak Grove, where there are farm fields, stations, and even a police station. It is also home to the Oak Grove Merchants\u2019 Bank, where Clarence Mason spends the day working in the vaults."}
{"id": "41562_5", "pid": "41562_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HANGING STRANGER\n \n\n BY PHILIP K. DICK\n \n\n ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n \n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\n \n it\n \n hanging in the town square.\n \n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n \n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.\n \n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.\n \n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n \n It was a body. A human body.\n \n \n \n \"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n \n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.\"\n \n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky\u2014the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is. How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n \n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n \n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n \n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n \n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to call the cops.\"\n \n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be there.\"\n \n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business before pleasure.\"\n \n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n \n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n \n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run. See you later, Ed.\"\n \n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle\u2014and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.\n \n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n \n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n \n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion\u2014and fear.\n  Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n \n And\u2014why didn't anybody notice?\n \n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n \n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n \n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look sick.\"\n \n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n \n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n \n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something wrong?\"\n \n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n \n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake\u2014\"\n \n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n \n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n \n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n \n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n \n \"Ed\u2014\"\n \n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n \n \"He must be sick.\"\n \n \"Or drunk.\"\n \n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n \n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n \n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.\n \n \n \n \"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n \n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there\u2014\"\n \n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n \n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n \n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n \n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost\u2014\"\n \n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n \n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n \n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n \n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n \n \"In the basement ?\"\n \n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with\u2014\"\n \n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n \n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n\"You mean because I was down there I missed\u2014the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n \n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed the explanation.\"\n \n \"Then it's official? The body\u2014it's supposed to be hanging there?\"\n \n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n \n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n \n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.\n \n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?\"\n \n The two cops said nothing.\n \n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of\u2014\"\n \n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short process. Only a few minutes.\"\n \n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and\u2014\"\n \n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.\n \n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n \n They weren't cops\u2014and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know\u2014and they didn't care. That was the strange part.\n \n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.\n \n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n \n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n \n And to his right\u2014the police station.\n \n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.\n  Them?\n \n \n Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n \n And\u2014something else.\n \n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.\n \n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n \n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n \n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.\n \n He was seeing\u2014them.\n \n \n \n For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.\n \n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest\u2014and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n \n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n \n Were there more of them?\n \n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien\u2014from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.\n \n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n \n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.\n \n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.\n \n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.\n \n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.\n \n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\n \n \n \n Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n \n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n \n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.\n \n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n \n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n \n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.\n \n Going home\u2014with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n \n Maybe there were others.\n \n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n \n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.\n \n Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or\u2014another they had missed?\n \n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them\u2014or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.\n \n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n \n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.\n \n A look rich with meaning.\n \n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.\n \n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell\u2014\"\n \n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.\n \n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n \n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n \n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. \" Stop! For God's sake listen\u2014\"\n \n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.\n \n Had he made a mistake?\n \n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out\u2014away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.\n \n \n \n \"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What\u2014\"\n \n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n\"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n \n Janet moved toward the window. \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n \n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n \n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.\n \n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me.\"\n \n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n \n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they\u2014\"\n \n \"What are you talking about?\"\n \n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n \n \"My mind?\"\n \n \"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town\u2014except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n \n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n \n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n \n \"My coat?\"\n \n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close\u2014but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n \n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n\"Where are we going?\"\n \n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it.\"\n \n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord\u2014it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?\"\n \n Janet was dazed.\n \n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward the stairs. \"Ed, I\u2014\"\n \n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n \n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're\u2014going out for awhile.\"\n \n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n \n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n \n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done\u2014\"\n \n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n \n \"He's coming.\"\n \n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n \n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n \n \"A ride? Where?\"\n \n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still\u2014\"\n \n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse\u2014the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n \n A stinger.\n \n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n \n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him\u2014and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.\n \n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.\n \n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n \n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n \n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.\n \n \n \n The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles\u2014on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.\n \n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n \n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.\n \n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n \n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n \n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.\"\n \n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I better get a doctor.\"\n \n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n\"We've got to get started\u2014cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.\"\n \n \n \n They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n \n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n \n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\" he said abruptly.\n \n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n \n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n \n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a theory,\" he murmured.\n \n \"What is it?\"\n \n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top\u2014the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time.\"\n \n \"A long time?\"\n \n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n \n \"Why do you say that?\"\n \n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture\u2014an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth\u2014\"\n \n \"So?\"\n \n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as\u2014a giant fly.\"\n \n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n \n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains\u2014but finally they're defeated.\"\n \n \"Why defeated?\"\n \n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n \n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.\"\n \n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?\"\n \n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \" Bait. \"\n \n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n \n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control\u2014and who had escaped.\"\n \n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they expected failures! They anticipated\u2014\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n \n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n \n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed\u2014\"\n \n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n\"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole\u2014and a rope! \"Right this way,\" the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\n \n \n \n As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.\n \n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n \n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n \n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around\u2014and froze.\n \n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n \n What the hell was it?\n \n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened\u2014and fascinated.\n \n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30205, "query_start_index": 30207, "query_end_index": 30250, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The majority of the story happens in Pikeville. At five o\u2019clock, Ed drives from his house to his TV store across town. It\u2019s getting dark. He passes a small park where he notices the hanging body. Later, he is taken by two officers, and they are driving towards the City Hall. It\u2019s already gloomy outside - the sun has set. After escaping, he runs through a hardware store, climbs over a fence, and moves down a street alley. He can see the City Hall\u2019s roof. Then, he gets on a bus but soon runs away from the two suspicious passengers. He comes home and realizes that his family is under the influence of the alien flies. He crawls for ten miles, walks by a farm, and reaches a gasoline station, a couple of trucks parked near it. After that, he ends up at the police station of Oak Grove, the town near Pikeville. At the end, we meet another character who is leaving the Oak Grove Merchants\u2019 Bank."}
{"id": "50868_1", "pid": "50868_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33995, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Mars. A group of conquerors from Earth arrived here after the last four crews never returned after deciding to climb a very high Martian mountain. The fifth team with Bruce, Marsha - his past love interest, Anhauser, Jacobs, Doran, Max Drexel, Stromberg - the psychologist, and its captain Terrence arrived here on their ship Mars V eight months ago. A day before the ascent Bruce is reading Byron and thinking about his bizarre dreams. Then we see an inquest. With all the crew members listening, Terrence interrogates Bruce and asks why he shot Doran. Bruce reminds the crew about the genocide of the Venusian aborigines: five years ago, he and Doran were part of the crew of the first ship that landed on Venus; these explorers wiped out the entire Venusian community. Terrence claims that Bruce is mentally ill and doesn\u2019t have the real conquering blood. The captain understands the young man doesn\u2019t believe in the philosophy of conquering and remains faithful to the old ideas of democracy and freedom. Bruce then explains that Marsha and Doran woke him up after a bizarre dream, and he immediately saw something or someone in the window. When Doran saw the creature, he left the room, and Bruce heard his rifle go off. Infuriated, Bruce killed the man. \n\nStromberg deems Bruce a delusional schizophrenic and says that Doran probably imagined the creature, too. Instead of punishing the man by executing him, Terrence orders Bruce to write down everything they report via radio while they are climbing. He stays by the radio, eats what they left for him, and sometimes sleeps. Eventually, Terrence reports that the mountain is way higher than they anticipated - 45 00 feet. Later, he screams that he just killed Anhauser for dissent. The captain speaks of their great conquest, and Bruce sometimes replies to prove he's still writing down everything. His dreams become more realistic and he seems to see some crew members of the previous expeditions: Pietro, Marlene, and Helene. Terrence reports that they are at an altitude of five hundred thousand feet and later adds that Marsha is dying. She says she loves Bruce, and he recites a poem for her. Terrence later crazily speaks about toppling the Solar system but soon stops reporting. Bruce turns off the radio. The exterior of the ship changes - now he sees a small town and the grandiose mountain vanished. Not sure if it\u2019s a dream or not, he approaches Helene, who eventually explains that the Martians wanted to stop the human conquerors. They decided to create an illusion of an infinitely high mountain, and the colonists felt an uncontrollable urge to climb it. They both walk to a red mound, where Bruce notices the bodies of the crew members of all five ships. Only people like him remained alive. Bruce looks at them and, together with Helene, leaves the mound, entering the city."}
{"id": "50868_1", "pid": "50868_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33995, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bruce is reading some poetry he had sneaked upon the ship; he then dozes off but wakes himself to postpone one of his strangely realistic dreams. Jacob and Anhauser stand outside, surprised he did not run off somewhere. They have been on Mars for eight months, discovering other rockets that did not make it back. Everybody meets with Captain Terrence and Marsha Rennels, where they discuss Bruce killing Lieutenant Doran. Bruce tries to argue his way, but Terrence believes that he should never have been sent because of his bad mental state. Max Drexel considers him a crackpot idealist, but Bruce says that the first thing that the original travelers did to the Venusian village was destroy it completely. Bruce stops himself from arguing more because the New Era had only ushered final totalitarianism. Terrence asks him again why he shot Doran, and Bruce begins talking about the realistic dreams he has of the other crew members who never made it back to Earth. He continues to speak about the mountain, mentioning how everybody who has gone up has never come back down. Since their goal is not to conquer anything, Bruce feels no need to do it even if the destiny of Earth is absolute. When he is woken, he feels something looking at him; Doran also sees this too and grabs his rifle to go outside. Bruce is so overcome with rage about them killing aliens that he shoots him too. Stromberg, the psychologist, says that Bruce has schizophrenia, while Marsha also agrees that she did not see anything. Although the verdict should be execution for Bruce, they let him stay and take down radio reports when they go up the mountain. When the crew goes to climb, they begin documenting the experience for Bruce to list down. Bruce begins having more strange dreams, seeing a different martian landscape and meeting others. Terrence tells him that Marsha is dying, and he hears her call his name while telling him how much she loves him. Terrence continues his crazy yelling, and Bruce switches off the radio to see Helene smoking a cigarette. She explains how the Martians are masters of the mind and that the only people who survive are the ones who do not climb the mountain. The mountain is not real at all, as it is a product of the Martian\u2019s psychic powers. They go to check on the corpses after, and Helene asks if he loved Marsha. He responds that he had once, but it is too late now. As they walk towards the calm city, he asks if the crew is still climbing somewhere. Helene responds that not even the Martians know about that. "}
{"id": "50868_1", "pid": "50868_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33995, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows Bruce and his fellow cremates of the ship Mars V, as they explore Mars for potential life. Bruce is sat in front of his crew members, with Captain Terrence taking the lead, for an inquest. He has shot a fellow crew member, Lieutenant Doran, supposedly without provocation. He is set on trial for a mere formality - his fate of execution already decided - to determine his motivations behind the killing. Bruce proclaims that there are injustices aboard the crew. In particular, he disagrees with the crew and Earth's dogged desire to conquest, which Doran embodied wholeheartedly. \nBruce describes he saw a figure or a shadow out the window of their shelter that could've blurred between dream and reality. Doran had turned and saw it too, only to rush out and shoot at it, after which Bruce then killed him. It was then decided that because the rest of the crew were going to climb the mountain, instead of execution being Bruce's fate, he would remain back to record their notes over the radio. \n\nAs the crew went on their climb, Bruce sat back and drifted between sedative sleeping and dreams. The crew began to climb beyond the mountain's estimated peak of 45,000 feet. At 60,000 feet, Terrence reported that he killed Anhauser as he was dissenting, wanting to go back down the mountain. At 500,000 feet, Terrence comes back on the radio to report that Marsha is dying. Bruce and Marsha profess their love for each other as they reflect upon the past, before being interrupted by Terrence's proclamations of conquering the mountain and the universe. \n\nThroughout the story, Bruce has been having dreams of two girls and a man, set in a Mars landscape completely different to the one in reality. As Terrence's voice breaks off into undistinguishable yells, he looked out the shelter's window to find that the previously red and barren landscape had changed into the lush landscape of his dreams. He sees Helene - one of the girls - and she tells him what's been going on. It turns out that the Martians had purposefully imaged Mars to appear red and barren and set up the mountain as a test for the humans. They had found that humans had an undeterred desire for conquest that incorporated no values of morality or humane-ness. As a result, only those who didn't follow this blind conquest like Bruce, Helene, and the other girl and boy are rewarded by the true landscape of Mars which is plentiful, lush, and inhabitable. While listening to Helene, they reach the mountain. There lies the bodies of the previous crew members who climbed the mountain, including that of Marsha's. Respectfully carrying her body to place beside the canal, Helene asked if he loved her to which Bruce replied that he did once, and that she was young enough where her mind was influenced by the other's will to conquest."}
{"id": "50868_1", "pid": "50868_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33995, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The fifth rocket, Mars V, hits Mars, and its crewmembers see the four rockets lying under the shadow of the highest mountain they have ever seen. Bruce is reading poems while waiting for the trial. Jacob and Anhauser, Bruce\u2019s crewmates, are surprised that Bruce did not run away from the execution, which is the night before all the crew members, except for Bruce, start to climb the mountain. In the trial, Bruce tries to explain the injustice done on Venus five years ago, when he and Doran went on the same mission, witnessing the brutality of Earthmen\u2019s conquest of wiping out the Venusian village without communication. But he soon realizes that it is futile as Terrence, the captain, and other crewmembers insist on the importance of the conquered strength and the twisted democracy. Asked for the reason for killing Doram, Bruce explains his dream, which seems to indicate there are lives on Mars, to them. In the dream, Bruce describes how Doran runs out to shoot the shadowy things in the mist as the Earthmen always do based on the philosophy of conquest. Bruce killed Doran, wanting to kill all of his crew members, and they think he is a psycho. They finally decide to leave Bruce with food concentrates and the work of recording while they climb the mountain. They start to climb the mountain while Bruce reads poems, sleeps, and dreams of a magnificent place. Along with the climbing, Terrence keeps reporting his feeling of conquest and power. He also kills Anhauser because he refuses to keep climbing. Meanwhile, as Bruce stops using sedatives and continues dreaming, the boundary between dream and reality becomes blurred. Three people seem to come from the previous rockets in Bruce's dream. Scenes in a dream are warm and wonderful. Marsha dies along with the climbing after confessing to Bruce. Terrence dies. When Bruce switches off the radio, the scenery outside the window changes; it fuses with his dream. A woman comes to him, explaining that the dream is reality while the reality with the mountain is fake. Martians created the phenomenon of barren land and the mountain as they wanted to stop Earth\u2019s conquest of the universe. With the mountain, Earthmen with the will to conquer will climb the mountain and die, and Earthmen who do not climb the mountain will live on Mars. The people in the dream he saw are all the crewmember of previous rockets who refuse to climb the mountain. Therefore, Earthmen will stop their conquest of Mars. After knowing the truth and seeing the corpses of other crew members, Bruce moves Marsha\u2019s corpse along the canals and leaves with the woman."}
{"id": "50868_2", "pid": "50868_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33999, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At the beginning, Jacobs, Bruce, and Anhauser talk aboard their ship Mars V which recently landed on the windy surface of Mars. Bruce then looks at the even Martian landscape with an incredible mountain right near the ship and the double moons illuminating the surface. When everybody else leaves to climb the mountain, he spends his time on the spaceship, eating, sleeping, and sitting by the radio. Bruce dreams of a green valley and canals inside a town. And later, when the crew stops reporting anything, he finally can see the real landscape of Mars. He looks at numerous low hills with purple mist, a canal, and valleys with green trees. The mountain disappeared. A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, there is an ugly red mound with the bodies of the conquerors lying there. After looking at Marsha and Terrence, together with Helene, he walks along the canal back to the city.  \n"}
{"id": "50868_2", "pid": "50868_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33999, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on Mars; it is originally shown as a dead planet with nothing but smooth, red hills caused by erosion. However, there is a mountain too that is around 45,000 feet. Mars also has double moons and is extremely cold. On Mars, there are also five ships from the Conquerors in their attempts to try and take total control of Mars. When Bruce has his dreams, the martian landscape changes to one of green valleys and rivers. There are wide canals, odd trees trailing their branches on the gliding rivers. There is also a pastel\u2013colored city that seems completely different from the Mars that the crew arrived to conquer. Later, it is revealed that this landscape is actually real because the fake Mars was just an illusion that the Martians set up using their powers to mess with the mind. The mountain does not exist either, having served its purpose of eliminating each group of Conquerors. "}
{"id": "50868_2", "pid": "50868_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33999, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story is set on Mars. However, the Mars that the Conquerers see and the real Mars is different. \n\nThe Mars that the crew initially see lifeless, barren and has a flat landscape with only a mountain estimated at 45,000 feet standing out. There are four rockets - prior attempts at conquering Mars - lay side by side the mountain. \n\nThe real Mars that is revealed to Bruce is vastly different. It had lush green valleys and rivers and wide canals with slow currents. There were inhabited cities that are pastel-colored and overall, the atmosphere was soft, vibrant and lovely. Beyond the canal, the red mountain still stands. By the red mountain, the remains of the bodies of the crew of the first four ships lie as skeletons. The dead bodies of Bruce's crewmates also lie there - all still tied together by the rope.  "}
{"id": "50868_2", "pid": "50868_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 33999, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story happens on Mars. There are two moons on Mars. There is a tremendously high mountain where the top seems nowhere to be seen, and the four rockets sent before the fifth rock lie in its shadow. The landscape on Mars is smoothed with red eroded hills, except for the mountain, which is unexpected in height and points toward Earth. In Bruce\u2019s dream, which turns out to be the real Mars, the landscape on Mars is totally different. There are green valleys, wide canals, trees, and cities decorated with flowers. Behind the shelter, five rockets lie beside it. There is no mountain in the dream, only a high mound of the red hill with corpses lying on it."}
{"id": "50868_3", "pid": "50868_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Bruce and Marsha?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34015, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bruce and Marsha were close years ago when they lived on Earth. They shared similar values and loved each other, but eventually, Marsha became one of the conquerors, ready to expand the human territories. Now she\u2019s almost emotionless. Bruce is disappointed and reckons that the other conquerors had gotten her young, and there was nothing he could do about it. When he\u2019s interrogated, the psychologist asks if she saw any creature before Bruce shot Doran. She seems hesitant and doesn\u2019t look at Bruce when denying seeing anything. When she is dying, she crazily laughs and admits that she is in love with him, asking Bruce to read her a poem. At the end, he finds Marsha\u2019s body among the eroded hills and puts it beside the city canal. He says that he loved her once, and she could\u2019ve been sane, different if the conquerors hadn\u2019t got her when she was so young. \n"}
{"id": "50868_3", "pid": "50868_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Bruce and Marsha?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34015, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bruce and Marsha do not interact much initially. Marsha is a witness of when Bruce shot Doran, but she makes no move to oppose the other members of the crew. She also hesitates to meet his eyes when she speaks, only following orders. Bruce mentions that they had gotten her when she was too young. Later, when Marsha is dying, she calls him darling and mentions how much she loves him. Even though she is hysterical, Bruce remembers the time when they used to talk about human values. He recites poetry to her and tries to think about the good times on Earth. Later, it is revealed that Bruce loved her before on Earth. However, it eventually meant nothing because she had been converted by the Conquerors too early and could not fight back. "}
{"id": "50868_3", "pid": "50868_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Bruce and Marsha?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34015, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bruce and Marsha appear to once have been romantic partners, with both proclaiming their love for each other. They used to share poetry and talk about human values and had a clear and affectionate connection back on Earth.  \n\nHowever, Marsha and Bruce begin to distance as Marsha bought into the will to conquer, whereas Bruce leaned further away from this thought. This dissonance is apparent as she refuses to look at him during his inquest and at the fact that Marsha goes onto the climb. \n\nDespite this, when Marsha dies over the radio, they share a last moment of spoken affection. When Bruce sees her dead body, he takes care to rest her by the canal as he expresses his melancholy  over \"they\" getting to her young. "}
{"id": "50868_3", "pid": "50868_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Bruce and Marsha?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34015, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Bruce and Marsha used to be lovers years ago. Marsha is indifferent to Bruce when Bruce accepts his inquisition from other crewmembers for his murder. When Marsha is asked whether she saw anything when Bruce killed Doran, she says no, even though she might see it. According to Bruce, Marsha was reconditioned to accept the new values in New Era, where strength and conquest are prioritized as the most important thing, compared to Old Era, where mercy and compassion seem to exist. Marsha keeps calling Bruce\u2019s name on the edge of death while climbing the mountain. She misses the warmth she used to have with Bruce, realizing that conquest is not everything. After she dies, Bruce places her corpse along the canals. Bruce and Marsha used to be in a romantic relationship, but after Marsha accepts the will to conquer, they become distant from each other. When Marsha is dying, Marsha finally regains herself and confesses to Bruce. Their relationship becomes tolerant and beloved."}
{"id": "50868_4", "pid": "50868_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mountain?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34006, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mountain is a sign of an impossible obstacle that the conquerors from Earth want to overcome, topple. Their urge to expand their territories and own the entire Solar System forces the Martians to come up with an illusion of something that can stop the destruction humans are spreading. The Martian mountain is a part of the hypnotic vision the conquered had access to, but they never saw the Martian city. They all ultimately died trying to climb it, from their drive to conquer everything they could find. The mountain is a perfect symbol of humans\u2019 greed for territories and power, and it is also what stops them all from expanding their so-called empire. "}
{"id": "50868_4", "pid": "50868_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mountain?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34006, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mountain is significant because it is the ultimate challenge that the Martians laid out for the humans. Since they are aware of the Conquerors and horrors on Venus, the mountain is an illusion that was made to stop the humans and let only the good ones live. Helene explains that the people on Earth will get the opportunity to live on Mars too, but the terrible ones must be destroyed so that civilization can be preserved on Mars. Even though everybody wants to scale the mountain in hopes of finding some sort of new discovery or territory for the totalitarian Earth, the mountain serves as a trap that kills all of the ones who try to conquer it. The mountain is what also hides the Martian world away, only fading away when there is only one sane human from each crew left. "}
{"id": "50868_4", "pid": "50868_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mountain?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34006, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mountain, placed there intentionally by the Martians, acted as a test for the Conquerers. Most of the people coming from Earth had a will to conquer, and the Mountain served as a physical manifestation of this desire. It becomes evident throughout the climb that the Mountain continuously rises above the initial estimate, and yet humans overtaken by their desire to conquer this will continue to stride on. By doing so, they have failed the test. \n\nIt is significant because it demonstrates the supposedly innate and greedy determination of humans to be the Conquerer and be at the top - figuratively and literally. Even when a task seems improbable, a human's ego will feed this determination. This will to conquer that is fuelled without reason or morality. And it's only through this test that the Martians are able to identify which humans do not have this senseless will, that they are rewarded with the supposed oasis that the Conquers themselves desired to take over. "}
{"id": "50868_4", "pid": "50868_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mountain?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34006, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mountain symbolizes a challenge to be conquered. It plays a significant role in the story as every Earthmen coming from Earth with the will of conquest would climb the mountain. The mountain is very high that Earthmen can see it from the space and that Earthmen with the will of domination would want to climb to the top, which they will never succeed. Everyone who climbs the mountain will eventually die as it is a hypnotic-like phenomenon, which cannot be described in human language, created by Martians. Martians make this mountain because they know that Earthmen with the will of conquest cannot bear not to climb it since they enjoy the feeling of belittling others and the power of conquering, which is shown through their actions of killing anything or anyone in their ways even though those killed species may not have any intention to harm them. The story also plays a crucial role in distinguishing between people with the will to conquest and people who has no desire to conquer. Those who have no will to dominate will not climb the mountain, and they will be sent to the reality of Mars, where everything is adorable and peaceful. In the story, only four people out of five flights can get to the Martian reality, which again shows the significance of the mountain. Using the mountain phenomenon, Martian will be able to stop the Earthmen\u2019s interplanetary conquest that Mars will be the furthest they can reach as they will keep climbing the mountain until they die."}
{"id": "50868_5", "pid": "50868_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Terrence throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34011, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Terrence is the ship\u2019s captain. At the beginning, he serves as a judge when he interrogates Bruce, who killed the other crew member Doran. Terrence listens to the story about Venus and claims that Bruce is not a true conqueror and is simply a psycho. He then asks a question about Bruce\u2019s dreams and later hears the story of Doran's death. Stromberg then concludes that Bruce has schizophrenia caused by inner conflict. He also supposes that Doran imagined the strange creature after Terrence asks him to explain the actions of the killed crew member. Finally, instead of killing Bruce, Terrence orders him to sit by the radio and write down everything they report while climbing. He reports that they are at fifteen and then twenty-five thousand feet and are to take a little time out. At forty thousand feet, he tells Bruce that the mountain is way higher than they thought - their computations are wrong. At sixty thousand feet, he shoots Anhauser after the latter starts dissenting and becomes hysterical and claims the mountain to be a tester for the real conquerors. Eventually, they reach the mark of five hundred thousand feet, and the captain is shocked. Later, Marsha unexpectedly starts dying, and Terrence concludes that women don\u2019t have real guts for such undertakings. At six hundred thousand feet, he starts declaring that they will soon find the top of the universe. Terrence made it farther than any other crew member of the five ships. He dies with his fingers still clutching the rock outcroppings. In reality, he\u2019s just over twelve miles away from the spaceship horizontally. \n"}
{"id": "50868_5", "pid": "50868_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Terrence throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34011, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Terrence is initially present for Bruce\u2019s trial. He does not understand how the other man thinks, believing that nothing is more important than the destiny of Earth. He is a great believer of the totalitarian thought, finding no problem killing whatever stands in their way of ultimate conquest. He decides to scale the mountain with the other members of the crew, leaving Bruce behind to take care of the radio. On the mountain, Terrence excitedly documents his journey, talking about how far they have gotten. However, he does have to shoot Anhauser because the other man does not want to climb anymore. He shouts a few more reports to Bruce before disappearing completely, having died. Terrence is the one who tries to climb the furthest after everybody else dies, wanting to be the one who conquers the mountain and brings the glory back to Earth. In reality, he had completely been trapped in the illusion and lays dead at the end with his arms stretched out."}
{"id": "50868_5", "pid": "50868_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Terrence throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34011, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "In the beginning of the story, Terrence leads the inquisition against Bruce for killing Lieutenant Doran without provocation. He has already determined Bruce's fate - an execution - but grants the inquest to understand his motivations. He often explodes in anger as Bruce only appears to give philosophical lectures about morality. When Terrence agrees to hear Bruce's supposed dreams out, he disagrees with Bruce's disinterest in climbing the mountain and concludes him to be a psycho. However, he agrees to let Bruce live only to note down the crew's upcoming climb to the mountain, for records. \n\nIn the latter half of the story, Terrence and his crew begin the climb up the mountain. Terrence often gives Bruce updates on the altitude of their climb, and sometimes request his response to make sure he is still there. Terrence also reported he had to shoot Anhauser for dissenting, as the latter wanted to descend back down the mountain. Upwards of an ascent of five hundred thousand feet, Terrence begins to go mad as he yells of his domination of the mountain and conquest of the Solar System. As his crazy yells fade, he is presumed to be dead, which is confirmed later on. "}
{"id": "50868_5", "pid": "50868_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\n \n \n By BRYCE WALTON\n \n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\n \n\n \n Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive\u2014except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n \n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n \n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.\n \n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n \n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n \n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n \n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n\"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?\"\n \n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n \n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?\"\n \n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n \n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth\u2014all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n \n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth\u2014or a warning one.\n \n \n\n \n With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.\n \n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n \n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n \n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.\n \n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n \n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n \n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back.\"\n \n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n \n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!\"\n \n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\" Bruce said.\n \n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n\"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here.\"\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it.\"\n \n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus\u2014?\"\n \n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n \n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n \n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n \n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n \n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about.\"\n \n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?\"\n \n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless....\"\n \n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.\n \n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt\u2014\n \n \n\n \n Terrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n \n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the\u2014\" Bruce hesitated.\n \n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n \n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n \n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here.\"\n \n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n \n Someone laughed.\n \n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n \n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n \n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n \n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n \n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?\"\n \n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n \n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place\u2014\"\n \n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it.\"\n \n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.\n \n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you\u2014it doesn't interest me.\"\n \n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.\n \n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window\u2014something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking\u2014\"\n \n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think.\"\n \n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n \n \"That's the philosophy of conquest\u2014don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n \n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n \n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance.\"\n \n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n \n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n\"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict\u2014indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something\u2014\"\n \n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did you see anything?\"\n \n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe\u2014\"\n \n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n \n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n \n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n \n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n \n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n \n \"What kind of service?\"\n \n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain.\"\n \n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n \n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in.\"\n \n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.\n \n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n \n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.\n \n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for\u2014to accept a challenge like this!\"\n \n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n \n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.\"\n \n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb\u2014\"\n \n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.\n \n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are.\"\n \n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be\u2014\"\n \n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n \n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\n \n \n\n \n The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same\u2014allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n \n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n \n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.\n \n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n \n ' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love\u2014and all our own!\u2014than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '\n \n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.\n \n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n \n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n \n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation\u2014he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.\n \n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up\u2014\"\n \n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts.\"\n \n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.\n \n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n \n \"Bruce\u2014\"\n \n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n \n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter....\"\n \n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n\"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all....\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing\u2014reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce\u2014that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\n \n \n\n \n He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.\n \n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n \n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n \n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.\n \n \"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\n But down, my dear;\n And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\n Will never seem fresh or clear\n For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n In the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.\n \n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n \n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\" Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world\u2014the top of everything . The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n \n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other\u2014Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all\u2014and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n \n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.\n \n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.\n \n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.\n \n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.\n \n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?\n \n The girl\u2014Helene\u2014was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.\n \n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.\n \n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships\u2014not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.\n \n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.\n \n There was no mountain.\n \n \n\n \n For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.\n \n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n \n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.\n \n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n \n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.\n \n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n \n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n \n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know.\"\n \n \"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again.\"\n \n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n \n \"' Is all that we see or seem ,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"' but a dream within a dream? '\"\n \n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n \n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n \n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind\u2014after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers\u2014we can see now\u2014it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance.\"\n \n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance\u2014the chance we seem to have here, to live decently....\"\n \n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long.\"\n \n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n \n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was\u2014he didn't know.\n \n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.\n \n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.\n \n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain\u2014\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n \n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n \n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship\u2014the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis\u2014no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel\u2014but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians.\"\n \n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see.\"\n \n \n\n \n They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.\n \n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to.\"\n \n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n \n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship\u2014horizontally.\n \n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.\n \n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n \n \"You loved her?\"\n \n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her.\"\n \n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.\n \n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n \n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.\n \n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are\u2014are the climbers still climbing\u2014somewhere, Helene?\"\n \n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that.\"\n \n They entered the city.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat happens to Terrence throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 33953, "query_start_index": 33955, "query_end_index": 34011, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Terrence wears a black uniform, and he is the captain of Mars V, a rocket that lands on Mars. Terrence presides over Bruce\u2019s trial that Bruce kills Lieutenant Doran. When they argue with each other, Terrence insists on the importance of the twisted democracy and the strength of a conqueror, which, according to Bruce, is totalitarianism disguised under democracy. Terrence regards Bruce as a psycho, deciding his fate of staying while he and all the other crewmembers climb the mountain. When they start to climb the mountain, Terrence reports to Bruce through the radio while climbing, showing his conquering feeling of climbing the highest mountain and belittling everything else, even the universe. Terrence kills Anhauser because he dissents to keep climbing. Terrence becomes more and more enthusiastic about climbing and conquering the mountain. When Marsha is talking to Bruce, Terrence interrupts them, expresses his ambition, and dies. He manages to climb to the highest but still dies."}
{"id": "51241_1", "pid": "51241_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28197, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The protagonist of this story is Roddie, a young male character whose interactions with the characters around him include mechanical arms and robotic functionalities. It turns out that Roddie lives within a dystopian city, to which alongside his android friends, seek to defend the city against its enemy. Whilst going about his day, Roddie investigates the manhole he often frequents and finds that it has recently been visited by something warm. Further investigation reveals Ida to be the culprit, a human female who has decided to help the wounded in the city.\n\nDespite Roddie\u2019s initial hesitance, Ida and Roddie strike up an easygoing acquaintance and gallivant around the city, with the latter guiding the former due to his experience. In addition to helping Ida find food and shelter, Roddie is able to ward off a potential attack from an android soldier with a talisman - his watch. However, this watch leads Ida to be suspicious of Roddie. As they neared the bridge, Ida insists on bringing Roddie back to where he belongs, fearing he had been wrongfully taken or indoctrinated. After a chase and climbing up the south tower, Roddie notices that Ida may be able to inform her fellow humans on how to infiltrate the city due to them being on top of the bridge. Choosing to defend his city and prove himself to his friends, Roddie does not hesitate to kill Ida and advances to do so. Ida begins to cry and defend her people - insisting that they are on the same side as Men and that the city belongs to the two of them, not Roddie\u2019s friends. Initially in disbelief, Roddie continues to advance before deciding to leave it for the next morning before comforting Ida and later on, realizing that he too, is Man. \n"}
{"id": "51241_1", "pid": "51241_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28197, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roddie, a man, raised by the androids in the ruined city, is angry to be left behind with his nurse, Molly, whenever the soldiers go out to fight the Invaders from the north. When he complains about it with Molly, a nursing android, Molly\u2019s robotic response irritates him, and he rips her head off her neck. The soldiers come back when Roddie is repairing Molly. Roddie orders the soldiers to line up and report, inspecting their damages. One soldier suddenly attacks Roddie as it seems to identify Roddie as one of the Invaders, but Molly protects Roddie, and he stops it. After the chaos has been eased, Roddie tries to fix and recombine the damaged soldier while reflecting on the dim future for him and the city. He accidentally burns his hair, and a civil defender firefighter covers him with carbon dioxide foam, irritating him and making him run away. \n\nOn the street, Roddie feels cold, being shamed by the sensation of coldness and reflecting on all the other differences that he has from the androids. The night comes, and he tries to find the way down to his usual hiding spot: a manhole under a bar. Once he arrives at the bottom of the manhole, he feels the warmth, realizing that something had just rested there. He prepares his hammer as a weapon, touches the thing in the darkness, and gets attacked by it. It is a girl named Ida who is one of the Invaders. She identifies Roddie as one of her sides. Roddie takes advantage of that, intending to kill her after gaining more information about the way to pass the impassable Golden Gate Bridge that connects the ruins and the Invaders\u2019 area. After the conversation with Ida, Roddie climbs out of the manhole, followed by Ida. When he learns that Ida recognizes him as one of the Invaders, he thinks it is his chance to be accepted by his friends by giving them his achievement. Roddie learns many new things and beliefs from Ida on their way to the bridge. They also meet an android, but Roddie lets it go away without hurting them. Roddie finds canned baby food from the ruined supermarket to feed him and Ida. Once they arrive at the bridge, as Ida keeps going towards it, Roddie grabs her, but Ida loosens his grip and escapes from him. She climbs on the dangling wire, followed by him. Ida is scared and wants to stop on the wire, but Roddie forces her to keep climbing. After they arrive at the tower, Roddie tries to kill Ida as she may bring more Invaders to come, but Ida tells him that he is a human, not an android, and surrenders herself to him. After the dispute about his identity and the superiority of either the robot or the humans, Roddie decides to wait for a night. The following day, Roddie acknowledges himself as a man."}
{"id": "51241_1", "pid": "51241_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28197, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows the journey of a man called Roddie. He lives in a destroyed San Francisco under the care of a robot called Molly. San Francisco is protected against \u201cinvaders\u201d by other robots, who Roddie takes care of with his tools. Roddie believes that the robots are his friends and wishes to go out and fight with them against the invaders. Roddie knows that he is different from the robots, but still wishes to become a part of them. When Molly and other robots start to malfunction more and more, Roddie runs to a manhole which he uses as a hiding place. Here, he meets a girl called Ida. Roddie believes that he has to kill Ida in order to finally be able to fight side by side with the robots, but decides to first get information out of her. They traverse together to the Golden Gate Bridge, where Ida tells him that the invaders are in fact humans like them that go into the city in order to get food and supplies. Roddie doesn\u2019t want to believe that he is like an invader, so he chases Ida to the top of the bridge in order to kill her. Here, they confront each other and Roddie was very close to killing her, but decides not to. At the end, it is insinuated that Roddie learns that he belongs with the humans at the other side of the bridge and not with the robots."}
{"id": "51241_1", "pid": "51241_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28197, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "It\u2019s the twenty-fourth century. San Francisco is ruined and now guarded by robot soldiers built by humans in the past. They fight with humans - Invaders - and don\u2019t let them come to the city. Roddie lives with Molly - a robotic nurse who still treats him as a child - and hasn\u2019t seen an invader. He sits with Molly and complains about not being allowed to fight alongside the soldiers. She starts singing a children\u2019s song, and Roddie rips her head off her neck. Soldiers come back. Roddie tries to fix one of them, but the robot unexpectedly attacks the young man. Molly defends Roddie by thrusting needles into the robot\u2019s eyes. Roddie is working and thinking about his desire to be accepted by the soldiers. His hair catches fire accidentally, and a Civil Defense firefighter covers him with carbon dioxide foam. Roddie gets frustrated and leaves. He is walking along cold streets and stone ruins toward his hideout. Roddie comes down to his manhole and realizes that someone was there. He starts moving in the darkness and soon finds Ida, a young human girl. Roddie understands that she thinks he is one of her kind and continues talking to her. She came on some boat and followed Roddie\u2019s footprints to his hideout. Ida says she knows a way over the Golden Gate Bridge and invites Roddie to go with her. They leave the hole, and Ida starts laughing at the diapers he\u2019s wearing. While walking, Ida tells him that men  rely on raids for tools and that she left here to help the wounded. Suddenly they meet one of the soldiers, Roddie quickly tells him everything is fine, and the robot leaves. Ida kisses him after the shock. They go to a supermarket to get food, and Ida asks why the robot let them go. Roddie shows her his watch - a talisman, and she looks scared. They reach the bridge. Ida starts leading him somewhere unknown, saying that she\u2019s taking him where he belongs. He refuses and starts chasing her with a hummer. While following her, Roddie starts walking along the suspension cable\u2019s steel surface; soon, walking turns into crawling. He thinks about killing Ida - it will earn him a place among the robot soldiers. They keep going up, finally reach a tower, and fall asleep for several hours. They wake up, and Roddie decides to look around the tower. He can see Mount Tamalpais, the Twin Peaks, and Mount Diablo. He follows Ida\u2019s gaze and finds the secret path the invaders are using. Roddie prepares to kill Ida, but she starts crying - it disturbs him. She tells him that he is a man, not a robot. Roddie says he believes the true men are rational and superior - thus, the robot soldiers are the real men. She asks him why killing a defenseless girl is rational and says that emotion is for creating. Roddie tucks his hammer away and comforts crying Ida.\n\n\n"}
{"id": "51241_2", "pid": "51241_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ida and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28211, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ida is a human girl that Roddie first encounters when she is hiding in the manhole that he frequents himself. She appears to have come into the android-ridden city on her own with the altruistic desire to help the wounded. She is selfless and persistent in her mission. She is inexperienced with the android world as demonstrated by her fright when the pair encountered a soldier, who only walked away after Roddie confronted it. Similarly, Roddie had to guide her around the city and help her with access to resources like shelter and food. \n\nIda is loyal and brave as well. Despite Roddie threatening to kill her at the end of the story, Ida insists on the idea that they are both human and that Roddie\u2019s way of thinking was incorrect. In the end, she is able to discourage him from killing her and he ends up comforting her. \n\n"}
{"id": "51241_2", "pid": "51241_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ida and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28211, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ida is short and lean, wearing a doeskin dress. Her legs are slender, and her tiny bare feet wear nothing. Her face is tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and dark eyes. She is friendly to Roddie when she guesses he is lost from the boat. Ida is brilliant as she figures out Roddie\u2019s identity after his interaction with an android and his familiarity with the surrounding areas and baby food. She is also brave as she suppresses her fear and manages her way to escape from Roddie after knowing his intention to catch her. She is dedicated as her purpose in ruins is to help her fellows in every way possible. Roddie sees her as purposeless and impulsive. She is weaker than Roddie. She is nervous and scared when they walk towards the bridge, being furtive and close behind Roddie. She is emotional, and she considers it a good thing because she is angry at Roddie\u2019s claim of the superiority of being rational."}
{"id": "51241_2", "pid": "51241_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ida and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28211, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ida is a girl that traversed illegally into San Francisco in order to help men get supplies and fight the robots that patrolled the city. Women weren\u2019t allowed to go into the city, so she snuck into one of the boats in order to help the wounded men who were fighting. She is described as small and thin, but that allows her to be quick and agile. When Ida meets Roddie, she wants to bring him back to the humans so he can learn where he comes from, and that he doesn\u2019t belong with the robots. She is very brave, because she wasn\u2019t afraid of being killed by Roddie or the robots. "}
{"id": "51241_2", "pid": "51241_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ida and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28211, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ida is a young girl, one of the Invaders living outside the city. The fact that she followed Roddie\u2019s footprints and found his hideout seems to indicate her intelligence. She is brave and compassionate - Ida was ready to secretly leave her safe community and come to the city to help the wounded. She is emotional: we see that when she unexpectedly kisses Roddie or when she starts crying at the end. Ida also has a strong sense of justice - she considers returning the city to men a necessity, she thinks San Francisco belongs to them. Ida also doesn\u2019t seem to like violence or destructive behavior - this is what she says to Roddie at the end. \n"}
{"id": "51241_3", "pid": "51241_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28215, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Although Roddie has been preparing his entire life for defense against something, someone, he never knows who his enemy is. Ida - by nature of being Man - is his enemy, as Roddie believes him to be an android. When they first meet in the darkness, Roddie is afraid that Ida may realize what he is. However, they have no trouble once they see each other and spend the entire day together. Roddie proudly takes the role of Ida\u2019s caretaker, noting that she is scared of the soldiers and not as strong as he is, so he takes her to a supermarket and feeds her. \n\nHowever, when Roddie reveals the talisman that prevented the soldier from attacking, their relationship changes. Ida tries to take Roddie back to her boat where she proclaims he belongs and Roddie insists that he belongs in this android-ridden dystopia. In their chase, they end up atop a tower. Realizing Ida now has the knowledge to bring home to the Invaders on how to enter the city, Roddie feels a sense of duty to kill her. She is the enemy, as he thinks she wishes to harm his city. As Ida cries - something Roddie can do but his friends can\u2019t - he realizes that he too is Man and decides not to kill her.  \n"}
{"id": "51241_3", "pid": "51241_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28215, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roddie and Ida meet in the manhole, usually Roddie\u2019s hiding place. Roddie learns information about Invaders and the relationship between Invaders and the androids. He also realizes the similarities between him and Ida, compared to his differences from the androids. When they walk towards the bridge, their relationship is the protector and the protected. It is the teacher-student relationship when Roddie learns many new and inexperienced things from Ida throughout the conversation. The hunting-hunted relationship is when Roddie tries to grab and kill Ida, and Ida escapes to the bridge. They have to support each other on the bridge cable as they can barely maintain their strength through climbing, where their relationship is supportive. But after they arrive and sleep in the tower, Roddie regains his energy and tries to kill Ida again. Their relationship becomes hostile again. When Ida finally convinces Roddie that he is also a man, they become mutually supportive."}
{"id": "51241_3", "pid": "51241_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28215, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between them is tense. Roddie wants to kill Ida because he believes that she is an invader, and he wants to prove to the robots that he can fight alongside them. Ida, on the other hand, wants to help Roddie and take him back to the humans, because it is where he belongs. They both learn a lot from each other, as Roddie had never seen an \u201cinvader\u201d and Ida was in San Francisco for the first time, so she thought that only robots lived in the city. The relationship between them is tense and violent as Roddie chases her up the bridge. Then, they seem to become friends, and Roddie ends up not killing her. "}
{"id": "51241_3", "pid": "51241_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28215, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At the beginning, Roddie is apprehensive and uncomfortable because he has never seen another human being. Soon, Ida makes him feel better by chatting with him. Roddie, who thinks that he is a peculiar type of robot, realizes that she thinks that he is a human, like her. She makes fun of him and seems to be comfortable with Roddie. When he shows her his watch, she becomes tense, and Roddie realizes that she knows who he is. She tries to take the young man with her to other people, but he attacks her instead. Both stubborn, they spend hours climbing the suspension cable and then sleep in the tower, too tired to keep up the altercation. At the end, Ida is crying and explaining to Roddie why he is not a robot. He doesn\u2019t want to accept it, but Ida\u2019s crying expression and an emotional monologue keep him from killing her. He seems to accept his identity the next morning.\n"}
{"id": "51241_4", "pid": "51241_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie use his tools (screwdriver and hammer) throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28243, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The first tool that Roddie uses is a screwdriver with a broken handle. He uses it to tinker with and screw Molly\u2019s head back onto her robot body, after tearing it off himself. He also used it when he was considering heating it over a fire to mold it into a different tool, but ended up not completing it. \n\nHis hammer is his weapon. Roddie keeps his hammer on his body, which he was able to reach for conveniently when he initially found a warm body hiding in the manhole. All throughout this initial encounter with Ida, Roddie has his hammer close to him, either clutching it or holding it in his mouth while climbing the ladder. He also uses it as a tool to break open cans. Finally, at the end of the story, he is prepared to use the hammer to kill Ida - even going as far as raising it threateningly - before deciding not to. \n"}
{"id": "51241_4", "pid": "51241_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie use his tools (screwdriver and hammer) throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28243, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roddie uses the screwdriver to repair the androids when the soldier ones come back with damages. After ripping her head off her neck, he also uses it to repair Molly, a nursing android. Roddie uses the hammer as a weapon to protect himself whenever he feels there is danger nearby. During his conversation with Ida, he holds the hammer in hand all the time so that he can attack at any time needed. He also uses the hammer to open the canned baby food that he finds in the ruined supermarket. He tries to use the hammer to kill Ida after they arrive at the tower across the bridge, but he doesn\u2019t."}
{"id": "51241_4", "pid": "51241_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie use his tools (screwdriver and hammer) throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28243, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the story, Roddie has to use his tools in different ways. At the beginning, he has to use his screwdriver in order to fix Molly and the other robots that reached his building. When Molly malfunctions, Roddie tries to fix her using the screwdriver. He also uses the screwdriver to fix some robots that were badly damaged after fighting with some invaders. Roddie also uses the hammer, but he uses it as a weapon. When he encounters Ida, he wants to kill her using the hammer, and the same thing happens on the bridge."}
{"id": "51241_4", "pid": "51241_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie use his tools (screwdriver and hammer) throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28243, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roddie uses his screwdriver when dealing with the mechanical parts of the robots. When one of the soldiers collapses, Roddie combines his metal limbs with the other ones he has, using the screwdriver. A hammer is a fighting tool for Roddie. He has it in his hand when he senses someone else\u2019s presence in his hideout. Roddie tries to attack Ida near the bridge and kill her near the tower at the very end with his hammer but changes his mind. He also uses it to get baby food at the supermarket. "}
{"id": "51241_5", "pid": "51241_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28230, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Put simply, Roddie is Man and his friends in the story are androids. Despite growing up with them and having been brought up by Molly, Roddie is human. One clear difference is the fact that Roddie is able to tear off the limbs of his friends and repair it back together. For example, he tore off Molly\u2019s head when her \u201cspells\u201d became worse, and then later tinkered it back on her head. Another example of this difference is when Ida begins to cry at the end of the story, and Roddie internally expresses that the first time he wept was the first time he noted a difference between him and his android friends, who presumably cannot emote in the same way. Similarly, they do not know pain nor fatigue, so Roddie pretends he doesn\u2019t either. At the very end of the story, he finally accepts that he is Man. \n"}
{"id": "51241_5", "pid": "51241_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28230, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roddie knows that he is weaker than Molly, his nursing android, and other soldiers as he has all the sensations, such as coldness, hunger, pain, and thirst, while they don\u2019t. The growth he has been undergoing until recently is also a sign that he is different from his friends, the soldier androids in the city. His yearning to sleep amid the danger makes him think that he was built by an apprentice when he still believes he is one of the androids. He learns from Ida, a girl he meets in his hiding place, that all the androids are heat-sensitive to locate them in the dark. He also realizes the similarities between Ida and him when Ida is supposed to be the Invader. After going through all the obstacles with Ida to cross the bridge and feeling his weakness on the cable, he realizes the differences between his friends and him again. Recalling his memory of weeping after seeing Ida weep when she tries to convince him that he is a man, not an android,  Roddie finally acknowledges himself as a man different from his friends."}
{"id": "51241_5", "pid": "51241_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28230, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Roddie always knew that he was different from the robots which he lived with. He didn\u2019t have the same build, or the same gears and cables as them. Roddie always wanted to prove that he was the same, and that he could help them fight. When he meets Ida, who is very similar to him, he starts to doubt where he belongs. Ida helps him understand that he is in fact human, and not a robot. He learns that he belongs with the other humans outside the city, and not with the robots. "}
{"id": "51241_5", "pid": "51241_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBridge Crossing\n \n \n BY DAVE DRYFOOS\n \n Illustrated by HARRISON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\n \n \n \n In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n \n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n \n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.\n \n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.\n \n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm not a little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n \n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n \n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse\u2014\" she chanted.\n \n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n \n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n \n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n \n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\n \n \n\n \n He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n \n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n\"Looking for a good time?\"\n \n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come to attention and report!\"\n \n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n \n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n \n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n \n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n \n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.\n \n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\n \n \n \n Molly stepped in front of him.\n \n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.\n \n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n \n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.\n \n \n \n Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.\n \n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n \n Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n \n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n \n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs\u2014single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.\n \n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n \n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n \n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.\n \n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.\n \n \n\n \n In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.\n \n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n \n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.\n \n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n \n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.\n \n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.\n  Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.\n \n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....\n \n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n \n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?\n \n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n \n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\n \n \n\n \n Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.\n \n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.\n \n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to fumble for it. \"Who do you think you are?\"\n \n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?\"\n \n His first Invader\u2014and he had dropped his weapon!\n \n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl\u2014whatever that was\u2014seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n \n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would I know how many girls there are?\"\n \n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n \n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.\n \n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n \n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n \n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n \n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man when I came back?\"\n \n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n \n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n \n \n\n \n \"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n \n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough.\"\n \n But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n \n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n \n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the Gate, I guess\u2014you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n \n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....\n \n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n \n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I\u2014I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n \n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her\u2014 if nothing happened when she saw him.\n \n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n \n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old thing?\"\n \n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The ladder's right behind me.\"\n \n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n \n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n \n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.\n \n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.\n \n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.\n \n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!\"\n \n He'd passed inspection, then\u2014so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd.\"\n \n \n\n \n When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n \n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n \n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.\n \n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.\n \n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many casualties....\n \n \"But why do you\u2014we\u2014keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men.\"\n \n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?\"\n \n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n \n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?\"\n \n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n\"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon.\"\n \n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?\"\n \n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n \n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n \n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.\n \n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n \n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n \n \n \n \"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n \n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.\n \n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n \n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n \n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.\n \n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n \n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.\n \n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?\"\n \n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n\"I've been here before.\"\n \n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n \n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n \n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.\n \n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.\n \n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.\n \n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\n \n \n\n \n He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n \n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n \n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n \n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n \n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you belong!\"\n \n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!\"\n \n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n \n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n \n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.\n \n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....\n \n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.\n \n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until\u2014because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips\u2014she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n \n Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.\n \n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n \n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.\n \n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\n \n \n\n \n She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.\n \n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n \n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n \n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n \n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.\n \n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n \n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.\n \n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.\n \n \n\n \n Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n \n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n \n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold\u2014of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.\n \n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n \n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n \n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n \n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n \n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n \n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n \n \"But\u2014but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men\u2014and the city is ours, not theirs!\"\n \n \"It can't be,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape.\"\n \n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n \n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't\u2014don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n \n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.\n \n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill\u2014see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\n \n \n\n \n Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n \n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection\u2014all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n \n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with\u2014if you have the courage.\"\n \n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n \n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning.\"\n \n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n \n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28155, "query_start_index": 28157, "query_end_index": 28230, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nThroughout the story, Roddie ponders the question of identity: he is different from Molly and the soldiers. Roddie can feel pain, he can be hot and cold, exhausted, hungry, or sleepy. While growing up, Roddie knew that the robots surrounding him did not have the same experience. He cried when he realized that he was different. This emotion also made him unique. After meeting Ida, he slowly analyzes her behavioral traits and sees how similar they are. She says that he is a human being, not a robot. He believes rationality creates the superior. But Roddie knows he\u2019s not a completely rational creature - he has feelings, too. Roddie spends enough time with her to finally accept that he is a man, not a soldier. "}
{"id": "51353_1", "pid": "51353_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in the future where Mars\u2019 two moons Phobos and Deimos unexpectedly vanished, space travel exists, and monogamous marriages are lawful. Celeste Wolver talks to her friend Madge Carnap, who claims that the old book The Dance of The Planets predicted the moons\u2019 disappearance. Wolver\u2019s husband, one of the three ones she has, Theodor tries to explain that the book predicts only some events, but he and Celeste soon understand they don\u2019t have strong arguments. Then Celeste and Theodor leave for a meeting regarding the recent events. While walking there, she shares her worries with him. Theodor says ESPs around the world have similar dreams. So, Rosalind, one of his wives, will bring their daughter Dotty to the meeting. Celeste, Rosalind, Frieda, Theodor, and Edmund were waiting only for the third husband, Ivan. Rosalind leaves to look for him, and the others start the meeting. They listen to recent news recordings: Mars\u2019 moons disappeared; Kometevskyites - people that believe in the theory of The Dance of The Planets - demand some government's action. The news anchorman declares that Jupiter\u2019s fourteen moons are not visible anymore. Rosalind comes back and says she only found Ivan\u2019s briefcase covered in mud, with the phrase \"Going down\u201d hastily written on it. They alert local agencies and talk about the project - Deep Shaft - Ivan was studying. The family splits up for a thirty-minute break, and Rosalind goes to where she found the briefcase. There the woman soon starts sinking into the ground. Rosalind realizes what happened to Ivan and leaves a glove pointing down as a sign; soon, her body is underground, and she keeps moving down mud and soil. Theodor, who went to the bar for the break, meets a colonel who tells him that there is a war between good and evil, and the planets are battleships controlled by divine power. The stories of these characters get interrupted by small extracts from Dotty\u2019s dreams, where she calls herself a god, and says she and her friends have been found by their enemies and need to flee. Dotty wakes up and tells Celeste she is a god. Celeste goes back to everybody, and Edmund lists all the known facts. He says Deep Shaft found a metallic durasphere inside the Earth and proposes that other moons had it too. Ivan and Rosalind are drawn into the depth of the Earth, and in their dreams, all ESPs say they will leave in some great boats. Everybody understands that their planet is a camouflaged spaceship. Suddenly, Dotty says in an unfamiliar voice that their assumption is correct. The creature uses Dotty to tell them people were part of the camouflage they needed to hide from the enemies who don\u2019t support mental privacy. Now they have to leave and can take only a few people. Suddenly, the creature says that their enemies changed, and now they don\u2019t need to hide or destroy the planet. Rosalind and Ivan return.\n"}
{"id": "51353_1", "pid": "51353_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story follows a group of people that are engaged in a polyamorous marriage. They are 3 men and 3 women, who share a child. The story follows how they are reacting to astronomical phenomena. After Phobos and Demios, two of Mar's moons, disappear, Theodore and Celeste meet with another girl that says that everything that is happening was predicted by Dr. Kometevsky, and it was written in a book called \u201cThe Dance of the Planets\u201d. When the six of them want to meet, they realize that one of them was missing, and the only thing that was left was his briefcase, with the message: Going Down. During this meeting, their little girl was having dreams in which she dreamed about a separate species. After one of them goes to a bar, the group learn that Earth was in fact created by a separate species that were being hunted, and that within Earth there is a spherical ship where the species reside. The species can communicate with humans that have Extra-Sensory Perception, and their child is one of them. Through their child, the group learn that the species\u2019 hunters found them, and that they have to leave soon. The story ends with the group learning that the species wants to take the humans with them, and they accept that the species wants to help them. "}
{"id": "51353_1", "pid": "51353_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Madge Carnap shows a book, The Dance of the Planets, which looks old and terrifies Celeste Wolver. Celeste\u2019s husband, Theodor, argues with Madge about the disappearance of Mars\u2019 two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Madge believes the book author\u2019s prediction, Dr. Kometevsky, that the Earth will take a leap in space, but Theodor and Celeste don\u2019t believe her. They separate from each other, Madge goes to a meeting in a Buddist temple, and Theodor and Celeste go to a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes to investigate the materials about the phenomenon. Theodor and Celeste talk about the possible omen and their family situation on their way. Theodor also mentions that many people with Extra-Sensory Perception have been dreaming similarly. \n\nWhen Celeste and Theodor go into the committee room, Edmund, one of the husbands, suggests the family to start examining the microfilms without waiting for Ivan, the third husband of the family. Rosalind goes out to check for Ivan. Other people take the projectors out of their suitcases and check the microfilms while Celeste turns on the TV. They start to focus on the audio, which talks about the discovery of the debris of the moons in their original positions and Dr. Kometevsky\u2019s call. When Rosalind returns with Ivan\u2019s suitcase, she doesn\u2019t hear the news that Jupiter\u2019s fourteen moons have become invisible on the TV. They examine the briefcase, finding it eerily muddy with two letters. When they take a break from the examination, Theodor and Rosalind go out to drink. Rosalind is dragged underground to the core of Earth while trying to catch up with Theodor. Meanwhile, Theodor meets Colonel Fortescue in the Deep Space Bar, who tells him that God is a military strategist and the whole phenomenon is the war between the forces of good and evil when listening to the news about the movements of Jupiter\u2019s moons and the unknown bodies in the space. Celeste watches Dotty in sleep. Edmund gathers everyone and starts to explain his discovery from all materials, including the metallic durashpere found in the center of Earth underground, the relation between the moons\u2019 debris and the durashpere of them, Ivan\u2019s and Rosalind\u2019s disappearances, and the godlike creatures in ESPs dreams. After his explanation, the godlike creature communicates with them through Dotty\u2019s body, explaining that Earth is their battleship, and that humans are their camouflage to escape from the pursuers. The pursuers have detected them, so Earth must be destroyed to let them grab the chance to flee. Only a small portion of humans will be saved to serve as the seed of the human race, such as Ivan and Rosalind. While the Wolver family is shocked by the truth, the godlike creatures negotiate with their pursuers. After a while, the godlike creature tells them that they are safe and will be brought to their place as the pursuers have changed to be good. In the end, Rosalind and Ivan are sent to the house, and the family gathers together.\n"}
{"id": "51353_1", "pid": "51353_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40359, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Celeste Wolver is listening to her friend Madge Carnap hold a book called The Dance of Planets from the Twentieth Century. Her husband Theordor tries to argue that Kometevsky predicted the reshuffling of planets in a vague way, but Maggie Madge that it is undeniable Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. The story cuts to Celeste staring at a landscape, as Madge comes up to talk to her more about Dr. Kometevsky. Theodor says that the Mars Base would have noticed something, but Madge says that they are smaller than asteroids. Once she leaves, Celeste talks about how this feels like a warning for disaster in terms of complete security. She does not feel at rest because she has three husbands, and Theodor says that they are still family. Theodor talks about presenting evidence of dreams in ESPs at the meeting. The scene cuts to Dotty dreaming about being a God with god-like friends, and there are other gods out to stop them. Celeste and Theodor enter the committee room. Edmund is impatient to start without Ivan, but Rosalind says that she will go check on him. Celeste gets a newscast going, and everyone listens to the news about finding remnants of the two missing moons. There is also news about Kometevskyites staging helicopter processions to prepare for Earth\u2019s leap through space. Rosalind suddenly walks in and shows everybody the microfilms that Ivan has used to handle. Dotty dreams again that the other gods are combing the whole universe to find them. Edmund says that they have done everything they can with finding Ivan, and he offers to take over the notes about the Deep Shaft. Dotty once again dreams about the other gods fearing that the escaped ones have found a door going out of the Universe. As Rosalind and Theodor step out, Celeste goes to see Dotty. As Rosalind goes to investigate Ivan\u2019s briefcase, she notices that something is holding her feet ankle-deep in the path. Rosalind disappears too, as the bartender at the Deep Space Bar makes drinks for Theodor and Edmund. Colonel Fortescue believes that this is a war between good and evil. The scene then cuts to Celeste observing Dotty, as she says she is a god. Dotty asks if Celeste loves her, and she says that she does. Edmund calls everyone back together, piecing together the four clues to come to the conclusion that planets are a camouflaged fleet of gigantic spaceships. Dotty then comes, speaking with the voice of the god as it says that they will be escaping from the pursuers and destroying the planets because they have been found. As everybody contemplates what to do, the voice from Dotty suddenly says that their enemies have changed. They are no longer seeking to destroy them and that the planets are free because there is no need for them to be destroyed. Everybody feels much calmer, and Dotty says that she just had the funniest dream. "}
{"id": "51353_2", "pid": "51353_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the principle of mental privacy?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The incredibly old semi-god creatures escaped the tyranny of a communal mind to which no thoughts were private. These creatures believe in the principle of mental privacy, and that\u2019s why they escaped and planted seeds of life on planets, including the Earth, as part of their camouflage. Humanity exists as a result of these actions, and it also may shrink in numbers since the creatures have been found by their pursuers and are ready to leave again, thus destroying the planet. The belief in this principle also allowed the enemies of these creatures to rebel against the communal mind and welcome them back to the society of enlightened worlds and let humans live. "}
{"id": "51353_2", "pid": "51353_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the principle of mental privacy?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mental privacy is one of the reasons that the species was being hunted. It is said in the story that the species was hunted because they wanted to maintain a degree of mental privacy that the hunters didn\u2019t agree with. The species isn\u2019t willing to compromise with the hunters, as they firmly believe in their mental privacy. At the end it is revealed that the hunters have in fact separated from a hive mind that they had, and that they are now looking for their own mental privacy. Because of this reason, they want to welcome them back into their society without any violence. "}
{"id": "51353_2", "pid": "51353_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the principle of mental privacy?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "There are superior, godlike creatures living in the core of Earth. Earth and other planets are the superior creatures\u2019 battleships, and humans living on the Earth are their camouflage to escape from the search of their pursuers. The whole race of these superior creatures was under the tyranny of the communal mind that no private thoughts exist, which is why they escaped from it because they devoted themselves to the principle of mental privacy, which they believed is the greatest good in the Universe. Moreover, they have been hiding successfully under the camouflage of humans because the rule of the race is to never interfere with any life forms\u2019 developments, which makes the pursuers reluctant to examine Earth closely for not to interfere with humans living on it. In short, the principle of mental privacy is significant in the story as it is the leading cause for the superior creature to escape from their pursuers and plant life on Earth, their battleship. Therefore, the story cannot develop without the principle."}
{"id": "51353_2", "pid": "51353_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the principle of mental privacy?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The principle of mental privacy is significant because it is what the group of godlike and telepathic beings have tried to maintain to the point of separating themselves from their race. It is also the reason why the beings must create great boats and ships to flee in, camouflaging themselves in order to throw off the enemy pursuers. Mental privacy is also important because it allows people\u2019s thoughts to remain their own without any other disturbances or possibly being forcefully shared. The godlike beings call it the greatest good in the universe because it is what they have stood for all their lives. It is also significant because without mental privacy, the godlike beings could control more things easily and become an even greater threat. "}
{"id": "51353_3", "pid": "51353_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho\u2019s Rosalind and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rosalind is a member of the Wolves family, the wife of Theodor, Edmund, and Ivan. At the beginning of the story, she comes to the meeting of their family sub-committee. When Ivan doesn\u2019t show up, Rosalind decides to go to the Deep Space Bar and try to find him. On her way back, she finds his briefcase half-buried in the dirt. It has a hastily written phrase \u201cGoing down\u201d written on it. Shocked, she comes back and shows her findings to everybody. They alert the local agencies and create their family member\u2019s description that is broadcast. They decide to take a small break, and Rosalind leaves right after Theodor. She doesn\u2019t catch up with him and stops at the place where she found the briefcase. Suddenly, her feet get stuck, and her body starts sinking into the ground. She understands that the same thing happened to Ivan and decides to leave her glove to show what happened to her. Soon earth covers her head, and she keeps moving down through different soil levels. The temperature rises, and soon she ends up in a silver egg-shaped room where she meets Ivan. A voice inside their heads explains that their bodies will soon go through a painless process of separation into small atom-thick layers which will enable them to endure almost infinite accelerations, and their consciousness will be intact. They learn more about the Earth and its function. Soon, when the pursuers of the semi-god creatures tell them about the changes they made, Rosalind and Ivan are shot back to the surface. They walk back to their family.\n\n\n"}
{"id": "51353_3", "pid": "51353_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho\u2019s Rosalind and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rosalind is one of the women who is a part of the Wolver family. She has 3 husbands and shares them with 3 other women. Rosalind is also the nurse of Dotty, the little girl who they all raise together. After they meet for a while, the group decides to have a break. During this break, Rosalind decides to search for more clues about the disappearance of their 6th member. Doing this, she gets sucked down into the Earth. She manages to leave her glove in the dirt facing down, which allows the group to understand what happened to her. At the end she and Ivan come back, and it is revealed that they went into the ship of the other species. "}
{"id": "51353_3", "pid": "51353_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho\u2019s Rosalind and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rosalind is the wife of Theodor, Ivan, and Edmund. She takes care of Dotty when Dotty is sleeping. She sets the mike so that Frieda, Dotty\u2019s biological mother, can know when Dotty calls. Then, she checks when Ivan will come to the committee room when Edmund suggests starting the meeting without him. She comes back to the committee room with Ivan\u2019s briefcase, finding it weirdly muddy with \u201cGoing Down\u201d. When Theodor goes out to grab a drink, Rosalind follows him and ends up being dragged underground to the interior of Earth, leaving one of her gloves on the ground pointing downward. In the core of Earth, the godlike creatures\u2019 battleship, she learns that she will be disintegrated into particles to store while staying alive. After the godlike creatures\u2019 negotiation with their pursuers comes to a peaceful conclusion, Rosalind is sent to the house with her family."}
{"id": "51353_3", "pid": "51353_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho\u2019s Rosalind and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40389, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Rosalind Wolver is one of the wives alongside Celeste and Frieda. Although she is not the mother of Dotty, she is noted to be the nurse of the little girl. She is described as a glitter of platinum against the darkness. When everyone is concerned as to why Ivan has not yet shown up to the meeting, Rosalind offers to go check on him. She later comes back, pale as a ghost, to show everybody what she has found from what remains of Ivan\u2019s disappearance. After, Rosalind leaves with Theodor, but she goes back to the area where Ivan\u2019s briefcase was. Although she tries to investigate further, something grabs at her feet and pulls her in. Rosalind feels the light of the path stay with her as she feels it grow hotter and hotter. Later, her and Ivan are sitting in an egg-shaped silver room that has no entrance or exit. A voice tells them that their bodies will be separated into layers one atom thick to be stored. However, this is a painless process and their consciousness will remain. Once the planets are no longer being destroyed, she comes back with Ivan through the outer door. Rosalind explains the experience as riding a rocket, and she is last telling Dotty that they have been dreaming instead of her. "}
{"id": "51353_4", "pid": "51353_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat\u2019s the significance of Dotty\u2019s dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40371, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the entire story, the narrative gets interrupted by small parts of Dotty's dreams. She has extrasensory abilities, and the semi-god creatures use her and other ESPs to communicate with people. In her dreams, she tells the story of these creatures' life. She speaks about their belief in mental privacy and says that other gods do not want them to have private thoughts and decide to hunt them down. The creatures that value privacy of thoughts create inhabited planets and manage to hide for millions of years from the others. But now they have been found and need to flee again. Dotty\u2019s dreams conceptually explain the origin of the planets of the Solar System and why those need to be destroyed now. Through her dreams, the creatures tell the Earth is their camouflaged spaceship, and they will soon need to live. \n"}
{"id": "51353_4", "pid": "51353_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat\u2019s the significance of Dotty\u2019s dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40371, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dotty is one of the humans with Extra-Sensory Perception, which allows her to be a gateway of communication between the species that live within Earth and humans. A side effect of this is that she dreams a lot from the perspective of the other species. Her dreams are a reflection of what the species is feeling and what they are thinking with respect to their hunters. Dotty could understand that the species was being hunted, and could understand what they were thinking. At the end, Dotty wakes up and tells the family that she was dreaming."}
{"id": "51353_4", "pid": "51353_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat\u2019s the significance of Dotty\u2019s dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40371, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dotty is Frieda\u2019s daughter who has extra-sensory perception. Dotty\u2019s dream shows how the godlike creatures who live on Earth, their boat, escape from their pursuers and use life as camouflage to escape from the search. Her dream also shows what the godlike creatures think. In her dream, the godlike creatures express their desire for mental privacy that is not allowed by their other fellows. The godlike creatures leave their fellows, who are scared by them because of the unknown of their secret thoughts. When they used all their ways to get out of the universe, they had no choice but to hide under the camouflage disguised with life, and they succeeded. Dotty\u2019s dream is significant because it shows how and why the godlike creatures fled from their point of view. It also indicates Dotty\u2019s compatibility with the godlike creatures to allow them to talk with her family through her body."}
{"id": "51353_4", "pid": "51353_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat\u2019s the significance of Dotty\u2019s dreams?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40371, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dotty\u2019s dreams are significant because they tell the life of the god-like beings who have separated themselves from the rest of the group. Dotty\u2019s dreams give insight to how the god-like beings came about, and how the start of the conflict between them and the rest of their race started. The dreams also reveal how the group managed to escape, creating great ships and camouflaging themselves so that their pursuers will not be able to catch up to them. Later, Dotty\u2019s dreams also allow her to be controlled by one of the voices so that she is able to tell the rest of the Wolvers what will happen to the world and them because the pursuers have discovered where the rogue god-like group has been hiding. Dotty\u2019s dreams also allow her to serve as a messenger between the two parties and inform them of what is happening in regards to the current situation. "}
{"id": "51353_5", "pid": "51353_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Celeste's attitude towards other members of her family and how does it change?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40415, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "From the beginning, Celeste seems to struggle with her complex marriage. She finds it hard to find complete security in three men simultaneously. In a crisis, it\u2019s disturbing for her to have her source of security divided into three. She also cannot accept that Dotty is her daughter because the girl was born from Frieda. Celeste points out that the probability of Dotty being Theodor\u2019s daughter is only one-third. She reckons that humanity might have gone too far with some things, including monogamous marriages. While in the committee room, she tries to determine if they are a true family or just experimenting with their relationship. The family members seem both familiar and unfamiliar to her. When she wants to check up on Dotty, she thinks that she is no one to the girl but still goes on. Dotty, after a small chat, makes Celeste say that she loves her. In the end, the reader understands that, no matter what Celeste\u2019s feelings are, Dotty loves all three women and considers them mothers. "}
{"id": "51353_5", "pid": "51353_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Celeste's attitude towards other members of her family and how does it change?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40415, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Celeste seems to not be too happy with her marital situation. At the beginning, she tells one of her husbands that she doesn\u2019t like that her happiness lies divided with 3 people, her husbands. She is also jealous that she is the one that has the least connection with their child, as the other women are the biological mother and the nurse of the little girl. Throughout the story, these same feelings are reflected, as Celeste seems to be wary when taking care of Dotty. At the end those feelings seem to take a back seat, as they were more preoccupied with the threat of the other species. "}
{"id": "51353_5", "pid": "51353_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Celeste's attitude towards other members of her family and how does it change?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40415, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Celeste shares three husbands, Theodor, Edmund, and Ivan, with the other two women, Rosalind and Frieda. Celeste is uncomfortable with one of her husbands, Theodor, as she talks about her insecurity of facing the unknown catastrophe in the future and having three husbands when she cannot find security from a single whole man who only belongs to her. She also does not see herself as belonging to the family as she separates herself from being the mother of a child, Dotty, born from Frieda\u2019s womb. She feels uneasy and unsecured with the polygamous family as all her husbands share one-third of the chance to be the father or a husband of any child or wife in the family. She also feels distant from her family while knowing all their quirks and habits. When she goes to watch Dotty, she feels bitter and worried. When Dotty asks her whether she is her mother, Celeste smiles with uncertainty, questioning her feeling of separation from the family. After knowing the truth from Dotty\u2019s mouth and experiencing the terror of losing her family, Celeste changes her attitude and feels belonging to her family."}
{"id": "51353_5", "pid": "51353_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nDR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\n \n \n By FRITZ LEIBER\n \n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Before science, there was superstition. After science, there will be ... what? The biggest, most staggering , most final fact of them all!\n \n\n \n \"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.\"\n \n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets . There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.\n \n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.\"\n \n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\" Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n \n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing at all like that has happened.\"\n \n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n \n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock\u2014the merest cosmic flyspecks\u2014yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.\n \n \n\n \n Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.\n  People must have felt like this , she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n \n \n \"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of the man.\"\n \n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.\n \n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n \n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n\"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think' I'm right.\"\n \n And of course she was.\n \n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she asked.\n \n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n \n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said, while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.\"\n \n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n \n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n \n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and\u2014\" she hesitated a bit\u2014\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?\"\n \n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n \n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan.\"\n \n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n \n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n \n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from Heaven and all that?\"\n \n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\" Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you.\"\n \n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n \n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?\"\n \n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n \n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance.\"\n \n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly seemed to need more sleep.\"\n \n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n \n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature.\"\n \n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those names Phobos and Deimos\u2014they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n \n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken\u2014the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course\u2014and these were about all that were available.\"\n \n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\n \n \n\n  I am a God , Dotty was dreaming, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to.\n \n \n A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act.\n  I and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats , Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\n \n \n \n\n \n As Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver\u2014a glitter of platinum against darkness\u2014came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table.\n \n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment.\n \n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n \n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n \n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a two minutes walk.\"\n \n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n \n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls.\"\n \n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n \n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material.\n \n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio.\n \n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n \n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos\u2014that is, the volume of space they'd be occupying if their positions had remained normal\u2014report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n \n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris\u2014solid, tangible stuff\u2014seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the moons has been found.\n \n \"The rest will also be!\"\n \n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors.\n \n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for\u2014and I quote\u2014'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets .\n \n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n \n \"This Earth is not the steadfast place\n We landsmen build upon;\n From deep to deep she varies pace,\n And while she comes is gone.\n Beneath my feet I feel\n Her smooth bulk heave and dip;\n With velvet plunge and soft upreel\n She swings and steadies to her keel\n Like a gallant, gallant ship.\"\n \n\n \n While the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness.\n \n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope.\n \n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance\u2014until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out?\n \n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading.\n \n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels duty-bound to release. Jupiter's fourteen moons are no longer visible! \"\n \n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating.\n \n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt.\n \n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out\u2014almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n \n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy.\n \n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n \n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words:\n \n \"Going down!\"\n \n \n\n  The other gods , Dotty dreamt, are combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\n \n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening\u2014which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n \n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n \n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly about the Deep Shaft.\"\n \n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five miles?\"\n \n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n \n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase.\n \n \n\n  Our trick has succeeded , Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison.\n \n \n \n\n \n Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We need a break.\"\n \n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n \n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n \n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder.\n \n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n \n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n \n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\n  Not my child , she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother, Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\n \n \n But then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either side, no more.\n \n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n \n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether.\n \n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n \n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n \n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot\u2014an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n \n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind\u2014the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n \n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward.\n \n Something held her feet.\n \n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n \n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n \n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n \n She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes.\n \n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\n \n \n\n \n And still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\n \n \n\n \n Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone.\n \n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster.\n \n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires.\n \n \n\n \n At first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen.\n \n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling\u2014a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods' and in some way responsible for current events.\n \n \"It is thought\u2014\"\n \n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n\"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranate juice.\n \n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\n \n \n\n \n Theodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n \n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n \n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n \n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible.\"\n \n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n \n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing.\n \n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n \n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n \n \"Frankly, no.\"\n \n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n \n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow.\n \n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach\u2014what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then\u2014\"\n \n \"You don't mean to imply\u2014\" Theodor interrupted.\n \n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n \n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n \n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\n \n \n\n \n Dotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n \n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n\"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!\"\n \n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand.\n \n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile.\n \n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then, after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer.\"\n \n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n \n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n \n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you very much.\"\n \n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n \n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up.\n \n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If you want me, dear, just call.\"\n \n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\n \n \n\n \n Edmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear.\n \n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have.\"\n \n The others nodded.\n \n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n \n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n \n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n \n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint\u2014from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downward-pointing glove in the other\u2014that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth.\n \n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n \n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n \n \n\n \n He could tell from their looks that the others did, but couldn't bring\n themselves to put it into words.\n \n \"I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for\n us to accept,\" he said softly. \"Much more, even, than the size-scale.\n The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole\n career of Man\u2014in fact, the whole career of life\u2014is no more than a few\n thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a\n minor stage property\u2014a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage.\"\n \n This time he went on, \"Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts\n of odd things about the Earth\u2014that it might even be a kind of single\n living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on.\n But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth,\n together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might\n be....\"\n \n In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, \"... a camouflaged fleet of\n gigantic spherical spaceships.\"\n \n \" Your guess happens to be the precise truth. \"\n \n At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung\n toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied\n little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind.\n Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed.\n \n She said, \"I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists\n call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of\n telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my\n thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the\n disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth.\"\n \n Celeste swayed a step forward. \"Baby....\" she implored.\n \n Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, \"It is true that we planted\n the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our\n camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And\n it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our\n hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must\n make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe\n that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our\n existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe.\n \n \"But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race\n is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is\n our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of\n the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage\u2014it would make our\n pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely.\n \n \"Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with\n interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped\n your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away\n from war and finally succeeding\u2014which may have given the betraying\n clue to our pursuers.\n \n \"Your planets must be burst asunder\u2014this particular planet in the\n area of the Pacific\u2014so that we may have our last chance to escape.\n Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We\n cannot invite you inside our ships\u2014not for lack of space, but because\n you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be\n subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of\n which we have enough only for a few.\n \n \"Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human\n race may\u2014if we ourselves somehow survive\u2014be born.\"\n \n \n\n \n Rosalind and Ivan stared dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped\n silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were\n sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile\n journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the\n heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here,\n the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that\n spoke inside their minds.\n \n \"In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom\n thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure\n almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space.\n But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle\n will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure\n throughout the process.\"\n \n Rosalind looked at her gold-shod toes. She was wondering, will they go\n first, or my head? Or will I be peeled like an apple?\n \n \n She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing.\n \n \n\n \n Up in the committee room, the other Wolvers slumped around the table.\n Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering,\n quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the\n connection open, but no voice from the other end.\n \n They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused\n medley of denials, prayers, Kometevskyite chatterings, and a few\n astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival.\n \n These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the\n Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship\n burst forth\u2014provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets\n or reaction.\n \n It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would\n diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope\n of rock and water and air would slowly fall together, though at the\n same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there\n would no longer be the mass required to hold it.\n \n However, there might be definite chances of temporary and even\n prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed\n structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on\n Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with\n as many passengers as could be carried.\n \n But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort.\n They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers.\n \n A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful!\n It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying\n subjective concept. Objectively, though, it would be a more awesome\n sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. It's an\n absurd and even brutal thing to wish\u2014but I wish I could see the whole\n cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a\n tiny personal event.\n \n \n Dotty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and\n alarmed.\n \n \"We are in contact with our pursuers,\" she said in the\n familiar-unfamiliar voice. \"Negotiations are now going on. There\n seems to be\u2014there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and\n vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory.\" She paused,\n the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty.\n\"Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false,\n intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to\n destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful....\"\n \n They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as\n though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that\n she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and\n violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal,\n that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba ... and then realized\n with an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation.\n \n \"No!\" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. \"They have changed! During\n the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing\n nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal\n mind to which no thoughts are private ... the tyranny that we ourselves\n fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to\n a society that we and they can make truly great!\"\n \n \n\n \n Frieda collapsed to a chair, trembling between laughter and hysterical\n weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words\n to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV\n set.\n \n Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture\n window and peered out beside Edmund. She saw lights bobbing along the\n paths with a wild excitement.\n \n On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in\n the sky\u2014whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help\n Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell.\n \n Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn.\n\"And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome\n you\u2014whatever your future career on these planets or like ones\u2014into\n the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone\n and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!\"\n \n The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenly smiling,\n arm in arm.\n \n \"Like rockets,\" Rosalind blurted happily. \"We came through the\n durasphere and solid rock ... shot up right to the surface.\"\n \n \"They didn't have to take us along,\" Ivan added with a bleary grin.\n\"But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live\n in fear, so they must have told you by now.\"\n \n \"Yes, we know,\" said Theodor. \"They must be almost godlike in their\n goodness. I feel ... calm.\"\n \n Edmund nodded soberly. \"Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I\n suppose, that\u2014well, we're not alone.\"\n \n Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly\n little-girl smile.\n \n \"Oh, Mummy,\" she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke\n to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, \"I've just had the funniest dream.\"\n \n \"No, darling,\" said Rosalind gently, \"it's we who had the dream. We've\n just awakened.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is Celeste's attitude towards other members of her family and how does it change?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 40317, "query_start_index": 40319, "query_end_index": 40415, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Celeste is initially wary about having three husbands. She is aware that as a woman, she needs to find complete security. The complex marriages are stressful because each of her husbands only have one third of a security. She also does not regard Dotty too fondly, claiming that she is just Frieda\u2019s daughter. Although Celeste is quite casual when Theodor kisses the other two wives, she begins to think later whether or not they are actually family. She wonders if they are truly a united group or just a bunch of silly adolescents playing around with marriage. Later, she does begin to warm up to Dotty after the child asks if she loves her. She says that she loves Dotty, despite the earlier feelings, and even tries to call out to her later. Although Celeste does not explicitly admit it, she does begin to grow closer and secure with the other family members. "}
{"id": "51662_1", "pid": "51662_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry Burr is begged by his wife Edna to go see a doctor because she believes that he is sick in the head. He refuses to believe that anything is wrong, but he does admit that there are times where he lies in fear over nothing and mixes up his memories. The story then jumps to the present, where he begins to think about a blond boy named Davie. Edna is confused because they have no children. Edna brings up seeing a doctor again, he angrily responds that it will only be Timkins who brought their son into the world. Edna tells him they had no son, and Timkins died a while ago. The scene cuts to breakfast, where Harry complains about a lack of meat. Edna explains that there is only multi-pro because of the current crisis in the country. Harry begins to go walk outside, but he experiences more strange memories that don\u2019t add up. He picks up the delivery that Edna ordered. Edna asks if there is anything good on television this week because there is only one channel. After a late lunch, Harry goes to check on the animals again and wonders what happened to the rest of the livestock. Edna tells him that they got the same as everyone else, and he goes upstairs again. When he awakes again, Gloria and Walt have arrived. He asks about Penny and Frances. After they leave, He takes his mare Plum out for a ride, and they arrive at a barbed wire fence area up north. He gets over the wire and continues to walk north, until the earth changes to sand. Then, the sand becomes wooden flooring; there is also a loud roaring sound. When he reaches a waist-high metal railing, he runs back to Plum again. Harry has the idea to ride to town, even if the other neighbors tell him to stop and for somebody to call the police. Soon, two policemen come out to escort him to the doctor. Harry asks the doctor where his son is, and the doctor explains that he is dead like so many millions of others. The doctor tells him he has so many things to do, and he says there are a few remaining people who are still alive. Harry\u2019s brain struggles with the impossible concept, and he thinks about how this is not Iowa. Just as Harry realizes what they are on, the switch is thrown, and he finds himself feeling better from the diathermy treatment. Before Harry leaves, the doctor tests him one last time by telling him that they are on an ark. Harry is confused, which means that the treatment works. He goes home to Edna and is happier than ever. "}
{"id": "51662_1", "pid": "51662_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows Harry, a farmer living in Iowa. He and his wife, Edna, live in a time of crisis and so there are many government regulations to follow. Some of these regulations include food rationing, being restricting to farming vegetables, only being able to travel to the neighbors house, etc. While going about his day, Harry often has visions of a young boy named Davie, someone he understands to be his and Edna's son. He is also constantly discombobulated by the placement of things in the house as well as events that supposedly did or did not happen. This confusion leads Edna to be very worried about him, and she insists for him to visit Dr. Hamming, which he refuses. \n\nOne night, their neighbors Walt and Gloria visit. Harry mistakenly asks about their older daughter - who doesn't exist - and spends the rest of the dinner quiet. After the neighbors leave, Edna is furthermore distraught which prompts Harry to leave the house in hopes of clearing his mind. Outside, he creates a makeshift saddle over his horse, Plum, and rides off into the unplanted fields. After travelling for a while, he and Plum approach a fenced off property labelled \"Phineas Grotton Farm\". Trespassing nonetheless, he rides Plum forwards before pausing; he felt as if everything around him was wrong, including his supposed friend Pangborn putting up a massive fence. \n\nGoing over the fence, he noticed a roaring sound growing louder and the smell of the air changing. As he walked, the ground underneath him changed from earth to sand to wood. He came over to a metal railing and found that it overlooked an endless crashing water and salty air - the ocean. After a while, he rode Plum back to his farm, only to note that he had arrived without even needing to go through town. On the way back, he was spotted breaking travel regulations and was pulled over by the police, who take him to the doctor's office. \n\nAt the doctor's office, his confusion is finally explained away. While being prepped for treatment, Dr. Hamming reveals that his supposed son, Davie, and friend Pangborn, were indeed real and alive, but killed by the bombs. Only a few remain amongst the uninhabitable land, and so it was Dr. Hamming who brought them along to his inhabitable world. Dr. Hamming, his two sons, and his now late wife work together to wipe the bad memories from the townspeople and keep the community going as they, on board an ark, continually search for inhabitable land. As Harry begins to form his own conclusions, Dr. Hammings injects him with the treatment and his sane mind is restored. \n\nAt the end, Harry returns home to his wife. She expresses a worry that he may have taken Plum and broken regulations, to which he insists he would never do. "}
{"id": "51662_1", "pid": "51662_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry seems to have a memory problem. His wife, Edna, often begs him to see the doctor in the town, but he refuses. He often remembers memories that are mismatched with reality. For example, he thinks he has a son, Davie, but all the people, including Edna, deny the fact. He remembers that his fields were planted fully with crops such as wheat and corn, not wasting the land, but now he can only plant a patch of vegetables with all the other fields remaining fallow. He thinks Timkins, the doctor he used to go for, is still alive, but Timkins died a long while ago, based on Edna\u2019s testimony. After eating the rationed food supplied by the government for breakfast, he checks his barn and farms around his house, which seem unfamiliar to him compared to his memory. He picks up the delivery of living supplies and sees the listed movies provided, having the same conversation with Edna as last week. The more he sees, the more he realizes that everything is wrong. When their neighbors visit them and eat with them, Harry has more mistakes in his memory and does not talk while eating. When Edna begs him to see the doctor again, he goes out to ride a mare called Plum.\n\nAt night, Harry rides Plum towards the north on the empty road. Soon after realizing he may be reported for breaking travel regulations, he cuts into an unplanted field. He faces a fenced farm where the owner\u2019s name is unfamiliar with what he remembered to be; he opens it and keeps going northwards. When he reaches the end, he sees a tall metal mesh with barbed wire fence with no gates and climbs to the other side of the fence, seeing nothing but the ocean while standing on the wooden floor. He goes back to the fence, climbs it, and mounts Plum. He tries to find the town but fails. He rides on the road, passing his and his neighbor's houses. People living next to the road shout at him for breaking the regulation, but Harry gives no care to those unfamiliar faces and goes to the southern tip, seeing the extension of the metal fence, climbing through it, and the ocean is there again. When he returns to the fence, two men in police uniforms from a car catch him. He gets in the car, letting one man lead his horse back to his house. They arrive at the doctor\u2019s house, where Harry is told by Doctor Hamming the truth that the people on the ark are the remaining humans in the world. All the other humans might have already died from the bombs, including his son Davie. Harry has those memory problems because his real memory is coming. As soon as Harry realizes what is going on, he forgets it again as the treatment is already applied to him. After the treatment, he returns home and chats with his wife carefreely.\n"}
{"id": "51662_1", "pid": "51662_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry has mixed memories and forgets facts from his life. He wakes up in the morning, asking his wife about their son Davie but momentarily remembers that they have no children. He then suggests that he cooks bacon for breakfast but once again recalls that there is a meat ration. His wife Edna asks him to see Dr.Hamming, but Harry is adamant. During breakfast, Harry complains about rations. Edna tells him they will have multi-pro meat for dinner - he is not satisfied. While doing the chores, Harry realizes his barn seems different and unfamiliar. After picking up the delivery, he says that the TV program guide has old moves, but Edna has never seen them. Harry decides to take a nap and feels that everything around him is wrong. After lunch, he goes back to the barn and sees that they have fewer chickens than he remembers. Their neighbors, Walt and Gloria, come over. Harry makes some strange comments about the neighbors' children - he keeps silent for the rest of the evening. Walt and Gloria leave, and Edna asks Harry to go to the doctor again. He leaves for a walk, harnesses his horse, Plum, and heads north towards the town. He soon reaches Phineas Grotton Farm, which he has never seen before. He goes through the gate and continues riding to the north. The countryside seems wrong to him. Soon, he stumbles upon a ten-foot-high fence with a slight inward curve. He ties Plum to the fence, climbs over it, and walks on. The earth beneath his feet turns into the sand and then into wood flooring. He finally sees a metallic railing covered in saltwater. He sees waves beyond the railing - an ocean - and nervously runs back to Plum. He disregards the traveling regulations and rides along the road in the opposite direction - the citizens scream that he is breaking the law. Soon, he reaches the same high fence, railing, and ocean. A police car pulls over: one officer takes Plum, and the other drives Harry to Doctor Hamming. When entering the house, Harry hears some rumbling sound. The doctor, the officers' father, asks about the second son and starts working on Harry, who keeps asking about Davie. The doctor reveals that Harry\u2019s son, just like millions of others, died during a bombing. The doctor claims that he, together with his two sons, is now running the world for the few hundred who survived after putting them on his world with the only uncontaminated soil left. He has to control the crops and livestock. He says he erased all the knowledge about these events to help people remain sane. Harry realizes Davie is dead, and he isn\u2019t in Iowa. The doctor turns off the radio switch, and Harry immediately forgets this. He thanks Hamming for the treatment. Harry hears the doctor say that they are on an ark, but he doesn\u2019t understand what it means and goes home in peace. \n\n\n"}
{"id": "51662_2", "pid": "51662_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Doctor Hamming, and what are his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27295, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Doctor Hamming is first described by Edna as someone who can treat Harry\u2019s so-called \u201cmental problems\u201d. She insists for Harry to go see him multiple times, but Harry refuses every time. Finally, when Harry is escorted by the policemen does he go meet Doctor Hamming in person. In person, Doctor Hamming is a thin little man with a bald head and framed glasses. He also wears a white coat and looks about one hundred years old. He lives with his two sons, and his wife is not around anymore. His son\u2019s names are Pete and Stan. Doctor Hamming is a very stressed person, constantly trying to manage the ark. He is also impatient as well, raising his voice when Harry asks him about his dead son. However, although the doctor is impatient, he is very knowledgeable in his field as well. He predicted that people will begin to die from a disaster and invested a lot of his money to build the ark. He has exceptional planning skills, picking out the farmers in the rural areas as people to continue living on the ark because he knows how important the farmers are. The doctor\u2019s treatments are very successful as well, capable of completely erasing Harry Burr\u2019s conflicting memories and making him forget that they are on an ark. "}
{"id": "51662_2", "pid": "51662_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Doctor Hamming, and what are his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27295, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dr. Hamming is the only doctor in the town, as the other Dr. Timkins had previously died. He is described to be a thin little man, bald, wearing frameless glasses and overall looking to be frail and at least a hundred years old. \n\nHe is weary and tired as he and his two sons are seemingly in charge of up-keeping the entire health, wealth and charade of the townspeople. He is compassionate as a doctor and has a deep passion for survival. He is generous, for he had saved a few of the remaining people alive after the bomb to try and find uncontaminated land to rebuild life on. \n\nHe describes himself as insane. Insane to be playing God, to be plagued with the memories of what actually happened, and to have been searching for habitable land for years on end. "}
{"id": "51662_2", "pid": "51662_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Doctor Hamming, and what are his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27295, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Doctor Hamming is the only doctor on the ark who is on the duty of maintaining the ark, finding the habitable land, and brainwashing the farmers on the ark. He lives in the new house two miles away from Dugan\u2019s farm. He is thin, bald, and little, wearing frameless glasses and a white coat. He looks very old. He has two sons, Petey and Stan. His wife lost her mind a long time ago before he had the technique to help her. He is stressed because of the enormous pressures of running a world by himself and his sons without much financial support. He is insane because he and his sons have been playing god to maintain good social conditions on the ark for three years, searching for habitable lands desperately, and surrounded by people who know nothing. He is careful as he makes sure everyone on the ark knows nothing about the truth but he and his sons only to prevent possible chaos and terror. He is thoughtful of his plan as he knows what humans need to survive on a single ark and organize things in a necessary order. After the explosion, he picks up the remaining alive farmers to sustain the human race. He is desperate as they cannot find any pure habitable land for years."}
{"id": "51662_2", "pid": "51662_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Doctor Hamming, and what are his traits?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27295, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Doctor Hamming is a medical specialist and a scientist. He saves several hundred people by relocating them to his ark with uncontaminated soil. He is resilient and responsible because he managed to gather the survivors and build a self-sustaining community that lives after the bombing. The doctor is lonely: he tries to talk to Harry, the only sane person besides him and his two sons, while the man\u2019s memory is not under any influence. He is pragmatic and cautious - the doctor started building his ark before the Holocaust started. He was planning the construction, ready for the following catastrophe. He wants to live and to let people live - that's why he spent the last three years managing his mini-world and waiting for some land to become habitable again. "}
{"id": "51662_3", "pid": "51662_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Edna and Harry?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry and Edna Burr are married. Initially, Edna is very concerned about Harry because of the strange memories that he experiences. She tries to plead with him to see a doctor, but he refuses to believe it. Harry is seen getting impatient with Edna, mainly because she is confused about the questions or people that he talks about. Even though she is concerned, Edna is good at comforting Harry. When he complains about the lack of meat, she tells him that they will have some multi-pro for lunch. The two of them split their duties as well, with Edna doing a lot of the housework and Harry doing the more manual labor. She also tries to suggest activities to do, such as asking what\u2019s on the channel for this week. Edna loves Harry very much, but she does encourage him to seek a doctor to help his mental health. At the end, when Harry returns from his treatment, she asks if he has gone out to break any regulations. He only laughs and says he would rather kill a pig than do that. "}
{"id": "51662_3", "pid": "51662_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Edna and Harry?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry and Edna are husband and wife who both live on their farm, next to their neighbours Walt and Gloria. Harry appears to be increasing confused and distorted in his memory of the places, people and things around. Because of this, Edna is worried about him and wishes for him to visit the doctor's office. Harry constantly refuses her request, for he is unwilling to admit anything is wrong with him and that he does not want to see an unfamiliar doctor. Supposedly the two of them have a son together named Davie. However, when Harry accidentally mentions him as a figment of his dream, Edna doesn't correct him that he passed or of his existence, and so Harry assumes from her that Davie was not real. \n\nWhen the neighbors come over for dinner, Harry slips up again and Edna begins to cry. He decides to go out for a walk and potentially sleep there like he had done as a kid as to not further worry her. \n\nAt the end of the story after his visit to his doctor, Edna is relieved. She expresses that she thought Harry may have gone off somewhere - but after gone to the doctors - Harry would never have dreamt to do such a thing. "}
{"id": "51662_3", "pid": "51662_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Edna and Harry?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry and Edna are in a marital relationship. Harry is Edna\u2019s husband, and Edna is Harry\u2019s wife. Edna cares for Harry a lot. Whenever Harry behaves as if he forgets the reality and sinks into the seemingly fake memory, she always asks him to see the doctor even though he never accepts her advice. Harry gains a lot of information about the present from Edna as he cannot remembers a lot of things, or to say, his memory is mismatched with what Edna has told him. Harry cherishes Edna so much that he can\u2019t bear to see her cry. When Edna was crying, he would speak softly and kiss her."}
{"id": "51662_3", "pid": "51662_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Edna and Harry?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27296, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the story, Edna becomes more and more upset because of Harry\u2019s strange behavior. At the beginning, after Harry mentions their non-existent son, meat, and their dead family doctor, she starts crying and asks him to see a doctor. He tells her he\u2019s still half-asleep. During breakfast, he gets irritated by how she calmly accepts the rations and the state limitations on food and travel. He makes several unordinary remarks during the day and makes seemingly strange comments about their neighbors' children. After their friends leave, she starts crying and asking Harry to see a doctor. Harry cannot stand her crying and goes for a walk. In the end, their relationship is supposed to get better since doctor Hamming improved his mental state."}
{"id": "51662_4", "pid": "51662_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27282, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on an ark that Doctor Hamming put money into creating. Although it resembles Iowa, the residents are fooled to believe that it is indeed Iowa. Each of the residents have their own farm and land area, and they are restricted to only staying inside a certain area. For the Burrs, they cannot go beyond the Shanks\u2019 place. Harry\u2019s farm area has his house, an area for the livestock, and a tractor shed that was supposed to be torn off. Their area also has a supply bin that is shaped like an old-fashioned wood bin for deliveries from the government.  The land they live on is also shared with the Franklins. When Harry takes Plum out for a ride, they go up north past the Franklins to where the Bessers should be.  Then, they reach a small Pangborn farm.  Beyond Pangborn, there lies old Wallace Elverton\u2019s place, which is known as the biggest farm in the country. There is barbed wire in this area, and he walks past it. Slowly, the earth becomes sand and then wood. There are also colored folks living here, when there shouldn\u2019t have been, and a place called Piney Woods exists as well. The place where Doctor Hamming  lives is two miles past Dugan\u2019s farm. It resembles a hospital, but there is nobody else inside of it. "}
{"id": "51662_4", "pid": "51662_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27282, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story is set in Iowa, perhaps a town, specifically, the farmhouse of Edna and Harry. This farmhouse had fields of land, a thriving vegetable patch, and a barn. Towards the road, there is a wooden supply in for deliveries and payment by the government. \n\nWhile on the horse, Harry encounters a farm fenced off with barbed wire. As he walked, the ground changed from beneath him. It went from earth to sand to wood. Here, he found a waist-high metal that when overlooked, revealed endless salty water - the ocean. \n\nAt the end of the story, Harry visits the doctor's place which is located in a new house past Dugan's farm. The house had long passageways and many. stairways, with gray walls and cold lighting. In there, there were windowless rooms. "}
{"id": "51662_4", "pid": "51662_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27282, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story happens on a wooden ark floating on the ocean. The first scene is in Harry\u2019s two-floor house. There are bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom in his house. There is a blue armchair, a sofa, and a TV in the living room. Outside the house is the barn with the floor strewn with hay. Across the yard, there is a pigpen with four pigs inside. Behind the house, there is a half-acre truck farm. Across the front yard, there lies a wooden supply bin by the road. The road is empty, along which are unplanted fields. Ten-foot heavy steel mesh on top with three-foot barbed wire surrounds all the houses on the wooden ark. Near the edge of the ark, the floor is covered with hard-packed sand. On the edge of the ark is a metal railing circling the ark. The doctor\u2019s house is big. Inside the house, at the end of a central passage and dozens of doors on both sides, a stairway downwards to at least two hundred yards depth, where the end leads to a ramp going upward. The grey plaster walls, black floors, and white lighting set a dull tone. An engine for the ark to move lies in the most central and deepest part of the house."}
{"id": "51662_4", "pid": "51662_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27282, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Harry and Edna think that they live in Iowa\u2019s countryside. In the morning, they have a small conversation in the bedroom. Then Harry goes to the bathroom to wash, then to the kitchen. After eating, he spends some time in the barn and goes to the truck behind the house. Later, harry picks up a delivery in the front yard. He takes a nap and then eats in the kitchen. In the evening, their guests are seated on the sofa, and Edna is in the blue armchair. Later, Harry rides to the north. He trespasses on Phineas Grotton Farm. Then, he climbs over a high fence, and soon notices sand and later wood flooring beneath his feet. Finally, he sees the ocean. He runs back to his horse and decides to ride in the opposite direction along a residential road. He again reaches the railing and the ocean. The police officer gets him to doctor Hamming. This building is big: they go along the central passageway and see dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways go down from it in at least three places that Harry can see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls, black floors, and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. He comes into a windowless room with a medical chair and a set of radios. At the end, after learning that he lives on an ark and immediately forgetting this, Harry comes back home.\n\n\n "}
{"id": "51662_5", "pid": "51662_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the government regulations that are imposed in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27322, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "One of the government restrictions that Edna reminds Harry about is the rationing of meat. Due to the crisis in the country, there is a shortage of meat. Instead of actual meat, most people eat multi-pro, which is similar to spam. The government also sets up boundaries for the residents to stay inside of, and they are not allowed to go past these regulations or else the police will come. The government also takes care of supplies, and most residents just have to write down what they want and pay a bill. In terms of money, the government takes care of it as well each week. Each farm receives the same number of animals because government agents paid flat rates. When Harry finds the stock of grain, he notes that the government has enough to keep going for a few years. Television is also restricted to old movies, playing only on one channel from nine to eleven at night. Later, it is revealed that these restrictions are imposed to keep the people alive on the ark long enough until they can begin to expand civilization again. "}
{"id": "51662_5", "pid": "51662_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the government regulations that are imposed in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27322, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Some of the government regulations included rationing the food. This included not being able to butcher their own meat,  but rather, having multi-pro. There was also a regulation about the type of farming allowed. Despite all the land, the government would pay the farmers for letting the fields remain empty as long as they only farm vegetables, and not wheat or corn. \n\nAdditionally, there are regulations on travel and gas. You were not able to go further than your neighbor's house. There is also an education regulation that says children should be at least 5 years and 9 months old before beginning to learn and read through a kindergarten book. "}
{"id": "51662_5", "pid": "51662_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the government regulations that are imposed in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27322, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The travel regulation restricts the area that people can travel to, which means their own houses and the closest neighbor's house. Whoever breaks the travel regulation will be sent to see the doctor. People buy their living necessities through delivery weekly by the rationing regulation. The farming regulations prohibit the plantation of wheat and corn, only allowing vegetables to be grown, resulting in many fields fallow. People would get compensated by the government for not planting wheat or corn. The rationing regulation allocates foods and living necessities for each family, regulates the supplies people can get, and prohibits people from butchering their livestock. Everyone has the same amount of livestock. Gas and water are also rationed that each family can only have a sink of water for dishes each day and a tub of bath water twice a week. The television regulation limits the channel to one, restricts the watching time to only nine to eleven at night, and constrains the audience to watch the listed movies only. Emergency Education Regulations claim that children should be at least five years nine months old to learn kindergarten books."}
{"id": "51662_5", "pid": "51662_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nBREAKDOWN\n \n \n By HERBERT D. KASTLE\n \n Illustrated by COWLES\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n \n He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way\u2014in the head!\n \n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes\u2014like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows\u2014he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.\n \n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....\n  Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.\n \n \n He turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n \n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n \n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n \n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n \n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n \n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could\u2014\"\n \n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n \n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins\u2014he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n \n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n \n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\n \n \n\n \n He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\" he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!\"\n \n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of multi-pro.\"\n \n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there.\"\n \n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know.\"\n \n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n \n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the way I had my barn....\"\n \n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!\n \n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n \n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen\u2014he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four\u2014behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n \n She disappeared.\n \n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n \n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\n \n \n\n \n He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n \n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n \n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n \n He was at the supply bin\u2014like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it\u2014or whatever they allowed you\u2014with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.\n \n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.\n \n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n \n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n \n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n \n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.\n \n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\n \n \n\n \n Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.\n \n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n \n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n \n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations\u2014one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.\n \n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?\"\n \n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n \n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n \n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions.\"\n \n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n \n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week.\"\n \n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n \n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book.\"\n \n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\n \n \n\n \n They ate in the kitchen. They talked\u2014or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n \n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.\n \n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n\"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n \n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n \n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n \n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n \n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n \n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....\n \n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n \n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n \n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n \n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n \n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n \n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.\n \n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.\n \n Was he forgetting again?\n \n \n\n \n Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county\u2014old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.\n \n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.\n \n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire\u2014five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n \n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.\n \n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.\n \n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.\n \n \n\n \n It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n \n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.\n \n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n \n Flooring!\n \n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n \n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.\n \n \n\n \n His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n \n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n \n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n \n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.\n \n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n \n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....\n  Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.\n \n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n \n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately\u2014a long time lately?\n  The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....\n \n \n He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?\n \n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!\"\n \n \n\n \n He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n \n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n \n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n \n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n \n Was this how a man's mind went?\n \n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.\n \n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it\u2014a car. A car!\n \n \n \n\n \n It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n \n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.\n \n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now....\"\n \n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n \n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a while.\"\n \n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n \n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Where then?\"\n \n \"The doctor's place.\"\n \n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it\u2014or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n \n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n \n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end\u2014a good two hundred yards away\u2014a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.\n \n He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.\n \n \n\n \n They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n \n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n \n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n \n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n \n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n \n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.\n \n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.\n \n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n \n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n \n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n \n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead\u2014except for us.\"\n \n Harry stared at him.\n \n \n\n \n \"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us\u2014myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n \n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n \n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would.\"\n \n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n \n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n \n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n \n \"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I\u2014we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n \n He choked and stopped.\n \n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n \n And this wasn't Iowa.\n  The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....\n \n \n \n\n \n Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n \n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n \n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n \n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n \n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n \n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n \n Harry walked to the door.\n \n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n \n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n \n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n \n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n \n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat are some of the government regulations that are imposed in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 27236, "query_start_index": 27238, "query_end_index": 27322, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "They cannot cultivate wheat and corn, and these fields are not in use. There are meat rations that significantly limit the amount of meat one household can consume. Harry also thinks about the travel regulations - he can't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They live a little more than a mile away from Harry and Edna. There is gas rationing. The livestock is controlled by the government, too -  every household has the same number of chickens, sheep, cows, etc. We learn about the Emergency Education Regulations - every child should be five years nine months old before embarking on a kindergarten book. "}
{"id": "61048_1", "pid": "61048_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22883, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley finds a yellow paper with unintelligible words folded in the book called History of English Literature by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine. After he continues to work, he sees a girl come in, browse randomly, and take Taine\u2019s book. The girl quickly riffles through the book, puts it back on the shelf, and leaves the library. After the girl leaves, Quidley checks the book, noticing the disappearance of the yellow paper. He learns the girl\u2019s name, Kay Smith, from the librarian and goes home. On his way home, he guesses that the paper is a kind of message transmitted through an esoteric book. He guesses the identity of the person who might do this message job with Kay, none of which pleases him as he has a liking for the girl, so he decides to observe this messaging action for a while.\n\nThe following day, when Quidley waits at the library, a girl different from Kay comes to the library, puts another paper in Taine\u2019s book, and leaves. Quidley sees the paper and finds another batch of unintelligible words, from which he finds two common words, Fieu Dayol and snoll doper. He puts back the letter and goes back to his seat. When the library is about to close, Kay comes to take the paper and leaves. Quidley follows behind her into a coffee bar. He intentionally spills the sugar on her, which allows him to start talking to her. Throughout the conversation, Quidley reveals his identity as a profiliste and accepts Kay\u2019s request to make her a profile. They set up a time to meet next time. After they separate, Quidley goes home and writes a letter to his father for the allowance.\n\nTwo days later, Quidley goes to the library again and sits at his reading-table post with his favorite magazine. He sees the third woman come in and do the same thing as the previous girls. He reads the new message and returns to his apartment waiting for Kay. He thinks about the meaning of snoll doper. When Kay comes, they do something sexually. The following day, puzzled by the secret of the snoll doper, Quidley decides to read the message before the exchange happens. Kay finds out that Quidley is reading the message. She tells him to come with her to deliver the snoll doper to Jilka and meet her folks. When Quidley waits in the car, he realizes the possible true identity of Kay and what may happen next. Quidley learns from the conversation with Kay that they are heading to the ship to Fieu Dayol. He also learns that Kay is the ship\u2019s stock girl, and all the messages are actually requisitions for the snoll dopers. He realizes that he is kidnapped to another planet, Fieu Dayol, where women outnumber men. He sees a man with Jilka ascend the ship and disappear. Kay forces Quidley to go into the ship by pointing him with a shotgun, which is called snoll doper in Kay\u2019s language.\n"}
{"id": "61048_1", "pid": "61048_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22883, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The plot follows Herbert Quidley. Herbert is a man who loves to engage with women. One day, he was in the public library when he saw a weird message scribbled on a bookmark in a random book. He then saw a very beautiful lady enter the library, and go to the book which had weird writing. Herbert learnt that her name was Kay. Herbert thought this was weird, but he thought it was even weirder when the next day another girl came and left another bookmark in the same book. Herbert understood that the girls were using the book as a means of communication, but he didn\u2019t understand the messages. After the original girl came back, Herbert decided to follow her to a bar in order to meet her. Herbert uses a trick in order to first approach her, and they end up getting to know each other. They agree to meet in a few days at Herbert\u2019s house. Herbert was very surprised to learn that there was a third woman communicating with the other two girls. After Herbert and Kay get to know each other more on their date, Herbert decides to confront Kay about her book in their next outing. When he confronts Kay, Kay tells him that she was in fact from an alien species, and that she used the books to communicate with her crew. Kay tells Herbert that he wants to take her to her home planet and mate with him, but when Herbert tries to refuse Kay takes out a shotgun and forces him onto their ship. "}
{"id": "61048_1", "pid": "61048_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22883, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley\u2019s penchant for old books has never been much of a problem for him. He finds a sheet of yellow paper in one of his Taine tomes and unfolds it, making him wonder what high school students read. He notices a girl walk through the door, noting that she deposits a book at the librarian\u2019s desk and heads towards the literature section. Although Quidley lowers his eyes, he finds that she also has picked up the book that he had earlier. When he goes to see the book again later, he notes that the makeshift bookmark is now gone. He thinks back to the message again and wonders who could have left it for her. Quidley later finds out that the girl\u2019s friend is another girl, and he tries to figure out what the second message means. Kay shows up again to leave another message, and Quidley follows her out to an all-night coffee shop to get her attention by spilling sugar. He introduces himself to her, and she responds that her name is Kay Smith. He feels intimidated by the girl for a moment, before she asks if he is really willing to word-paint her profile. She asks if they can meet at his place, and he agrees. A date is set up, and Quidley goes home. Although Kay is not in town for the next two days, he notices that there is now a third woman involved. The message is impossible to understand again, and he wonders if they are part of some secret society. When Kay comes, she is wearing a beautiful dress. Later, as Quidley is coming up with a new novel idea, he finds the fourth message again. As he thinks about her, Kay suddenly appears and tells him to put the book back. He is curious as to why she can\u2019t just give Jilka a snoll doper, but Kay says it is because of regulations. Soon, she tells him that she is planning to take him back to Fieu Dayol because he had compromised her and because there are not enough men back on the planet. Kay also reveals that all of the messages were requisitions because she is the ship\u2019s stock girl. The two arrive at the ship, and Quidley watches as Jilka and another man board the ship. Quidley tries to protest against boarding the ship himself, but Kay points a snoll doper at him. He notices that the object looks strikingly like a shotgun. "}
{"id": "61048_1", "pid": "61048_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22883, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley is at a library. He opens Taine's History of English Literature and finds a sheet of paper with unintelligible text. He picks up another book. While reading it, he sees a beautiful young girl enter the library, take the sheet of paper from Taine's book, get another random book from the shelf, and leave. The next day, he notices another girl who slips a piece of paper between the book\u2019s pages. When she leaves, he looks at the sheet of paper - it also has some unintelligible message. Later, the first girl - he calls her Kay - shows up and takes the message from the book. He follows her into a coffee bar. Quidley spills sugar on her lap, which helps him start a conversation with her. He tells her she can send him the cleaners\u2019 bill and gives her his business card with his name, address, and profession - profiliste. He explains that he paints profiles with words. She introduces herself and asks if we can paint her profile. They decide to meet two days later at his place. Before meeting with her, he spends some time in the library and sees another girl who leaves the third coded message. He is confused and doesn\u2019t understand why these girls are using this medium of communication. Quidley comes back home and waits for Kay. She arrives in a pretty white dress - he is mesmerized. They drink some bourbon and soon kiss. She tells him to postpone the dinner. The following evening Quidley goes to the library. He fantasizes about his future novel and finds a new message. Kay finds him reading the message. She look at the paper and then tells him to follow her. They get in her convertible, and Kay says that she has to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka, and then she will take Quidley to meet her folks. He admits to reading all their messages. She stops the car near a brick apartment building and leaves for several minutes. Quidley thinks of running away, but Kay comes back quickly. They drive to some ship which is supposed to take them to Fieu Dayol or Persei 17. She explains that she can and has to marry him now because he compromised her and because there are very few men on Fieu Dayol. She also tells him that those papers were requisitions, not messages - Kay is the ship\u2019s stock girl. They pull up to a ship, parked somewhere among country fields. Jilka arrives with some man who slowly walks to the ship. When Quidley refuses to go with them, Kay tells him that the Interstellar law allows them to take only the ones who do not conform to the sexual mores of their society. She presses a snoll doper - a term he saw in the messages and later asked about - against his back. He realizes it\u2019s something similar to a shotgun and starts marching up the plank. "}
{"id": "61048_2", "pid": "61048_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Kay Smith, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22904, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "She is tall with hyacinth long hair and blue eyes. Her skin is glowingly white. Her body shape is Grecian symmetric. She fascinates Herbert Quidley, a man who finds out the secret letter in Taine\u2019s book, when she walks in the library. She is the receiver of secret messages in the book, and she goes to the library almost every day to pick up the letter in the book. She wears a pleated skirt when Herbert Quidley spills the sugar on her thighs. She speaks with a slight accent that she pronounces \u201cinteresting\u201d with \u201canteresting.\u201d She walks demurely. She wears a dress that exposes a lot of her skin when she goes to Quidley\u2019s apartment, which indicates her intention to have sexual behaviors with him. She owns a convertible, and her purse hides a gun. She is the stock girl on the ship to Fieu Dayol, and her job is to deliver guns to her members, which is why she goes to the library to pick up the secret letters, the requisitions for the guns. It is revealed at the end that she comes to the Earth to bring men to her planet."}
{"id": "61048_2", "pid": "61048_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Kay Smith, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22904, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kay Smith is a beautiful girl who is pursued by Herbert. Kay uses a bookmark and a book to communicate with her friends. At the end we learn that Kay comes from an alien planet, and that she uses the books to communicate with her crew of women who also came from her planet. We also learn that Kay is looking for a mate to take to her planet, as there aren\u2019t enough men for each woman in her home planet. Kay ends up taking Herbert hostage into her ship in order to make him her mate."}
{"id": "61048_2", "pid": "61048_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Kay Smith, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22904, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nKay Smith is a tall woman with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes. She also has the Grecian symmetry of shape that instantly caught Quidley\u2019s attention. Kay is described as a mysterious person, going to the library to leave messages in the Taine book. Later, when she meets Quidley at the coffee shop, Kay is shown to be very polite. She is also straightforward as well, telling him that they will be meeting at his apartment even though Quidley does not usually make this exception. Although Kay is a pleasant person, she does become more assertive once she is found out. She forces Quidley to come with her, calling him the man who compromised her. When Quidley does not want to go back to Fieu Dayol with her, she threatens him with her snoll doper. "}
{"id": "61048_2", "pid": "61048_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Kay Smith, and what are her characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22904, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Kay Smith is a young girl from Fieu Dayol. She came to Earth to get a male partner and is the ship\u2019s stock girl. She is quite confident when she talks to Quidley. She is determined and charming - Kay manages to seduce Quidley very quickly and then orders him to reschedule the dinner. She is pragmatic and sly - we understand that after noticing how she can change the way she converses with Quidley and be both talkative and secretive, depending on her personal goal. Kay is good at planning and manages to almost lure Quidley into the ship by just concealing the information that can alienate him. She knows how to use a weapon. "}
{"id": "61048_3", "pid": "61048_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert Quidley, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22910, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley is a profiliste who often stays in the library. He has a variety of pseudonyms for his career, each of which has its own card in his wallet. He owns a hardtop. He lives at 61 Park Place. He often wears Cuban heels. His favorite little magazine is The Zeitgeist. He likes everything old, such as old books, old wines, old woods, and old paintings. But most of all, he likes young girls, which is why he starts his observations on Kay\u2019s behavior, a girl who exchanges letters through the book in the library. Quidley is a very thoughtful and careful person because whenever he reads the mysterious letters in the book, he always puts the letters back in the book and replaces the book on the shelf. He always sits at the reading table to observe the girls. He knows very well about romantic stuff and how to have sexual relationships with girls as he has his own skill called Operation Spill-the-sugar to start a conversation with a stranger woman. However, Quidley has little moral on sexual relationships because whether the targeted girl has a boyfriend would not deter his intention to conquer her."}
{"id": "61048_3", "pid": "61048_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert Quidley, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22910, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley is a Profiliste who loves books. He is very intelligent, and he uses his smarts to pick up women. Being a profiliste entails writing profiles with words. He loves to meet different women, but he never likes to commit to one woman. He likes to spend a lot of his time at a library, which is where he met Kay. He is also very curious, as he wanted to figure out what the messages in the bookmarks meant. At the end, Herbert gets kidnapped by Kay because of his disagreement with marriage, because Kay could only take a man who didn\u2019t fit his planet\u2019s sexual mores. "}
{"id": "61048_3", "pid": "61048_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert Quidley, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22910, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley is a man who enjoys old books and always reads at the library. He is described as someone who does not only like old items but also young girls. Although Quidley tends to keep to himself, he is courageous enough to snoop through Kay\u2019s messages in the Taine book. He also becomes more and more interested in solving the mystery behind the messages, even though he cannot understand what any of them say. Quidley is strategic as well, using Operation-Spill-the-sugar as a means to talk to Kay. He also does his best to get to know her, in hopes of trying to figure out more about the mystery behind the messages. When Kay tells him to come with her, he is a little nervous and even says that she is kidnapping him. He does, however, feel a little scared once Kay threatens him."}
{"id": "61048_3", "pid": "61048_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Herbert Quidley, and what are his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22910, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Herbert Quidley is a profiliste who likes young women, old books, and old whiskey. He is a dreamer and can indulge in fantasizing about his future novel and the success it could bring. He is a romantic and loves conventionally beautiful things. He doesn\u2019t enjoy commitment - we understand that when he thinks about marriage as the most terrifying thing ever and almost runs away from Kay when he thinks that she\u2019s taking him to meet her parents. He loves mysteries, like the coded messages he finds in the library. As Kay says, he doesn\u2019t conform to the sexual mores of society - he likes relationships with no obligations. He also considers it normal to follow a woman without talking to her first and peer at her messages. "}
{"id": "61048_4", "pid": "61048_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the snoll doper play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22902, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Snoll doper appears in every letter that is hidden in History of English Literature by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, a book favored by Hebert Quidley, from which he finds these letters and starts his observation. Quidley finds these words several times when he secretly reads the letters in the book whenever a girl comes to put a new letter in the book. He is fascinated by the first girl called Kay Smith who takes the first letter after he notices it. From then on, he has been guessing the meaning of snoll doper. At first, Quidley thinks that snoll doper means a person who has close relationships with Kay, like a boyfriend or a husband. He is annoyed by this possibility after having sexual behaviors with Kay, which causes him to secretly read the fourth letter before Kay comes to pick it up. When Kay finds out that Quidley has been reading her letter, she tells him to come with her to deliver the snoll doper to Jilka, where Quidley is relieved because he realizes that snoll doper is the name of an object, not an identity. On their way to Jilka\u2019s place, Quidley keeps asking Kay what the meaning of snoll doper is, but Kay doesn\u2019t tell him. At the end of the story, snoll doper turns out to be the name of a shotgun, which is what the letters are for, a requisition for the shotgun. Those letters are sent toward Kay because she is the ship\u2019s stock girl who delivers the guns. In conclusion, snoll doper is a word that puzzles Quidley throughout the whole story and causes him to be caught by Kay, the purpose of those secret letters transmitted between Kay and other girls through the book, and an object that forces Quidley to go into the ship."}
{"id": "61048_4", "pid": "61048_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the snoll doper play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22902, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The snoll doper is an important part of the story because it was a part of all of the messages. When Herbert read all of the different messages scribbled in bookmarks, he saw that the names of the girls repeated in every message, as well as the words: snoll doper. He was very curious to understand what they meant, so he decided to meet Kay. After Kay tells Herbet who she is, Herbert asks her whan snoll dopers are. She responds by taking out a shotgun-like weapon and forcing him onto their ship. "}
{"id": "61048_4", "pid": "61048_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the snoll doper play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22902, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The snoll doper is mentioned in the very first message that Quidley reads. It is also this message that motivates him to investigate further into who Kay is and what exactly is a snoll doper. Most of the story revolves around him trying to crack the meaning behind snoll doper, and he wonders if he could just ask Kay directly about it when she comes to his apartment. The snoll dopper is also largely relevant in helping him figure out what the next The snoll doper is still relevant either, after he finds out Kay\u2019s identity and has to go back to her planet with her. "}
{"id": "61048_4", "pid": "61048_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat role does the snoll doper play in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22902, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Snoll doper is one of the phrases that Quidley finds in the unintelligible messages from the library. It intrigues him because he doesn\u2019t understand what it means. It makes him think about its potential meaning. Eventually, it leads to his mini-relationship with Kay. When he asks her about this term, she says she will share its meaning later. Thus, she brings him to the ship without any trouble and knows she can use her snoll doper in case Quidley refuses to go. When he does, she presses a snoll doper - a tool similar to a shotgun - against his back and orders him to enter the ship. "}
{"id": "61048_5", "pid": "61048_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22886, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The first scene is in the library. Hippolyte Adolphe Taine\u2019s History of English Literature is in the literature section. The books are categorized in alphabetical order. Taine\u2019s book is in the T-section. The secret letters are always hidden in Taine\u2019s book in the T section, where the girls from Fieu Dayol always stop and take the book. A librarian sits at the front desk to handle administrative stuff. There are reading tables. The second scene is in an all-night coffee bar where Herbert Quidley conducts his Spill-the-sugar operation to start the conversation with the girl next to him. There is a sugar dispenser on the counter. \n\nThe third scene is in Quidley\u2019s apartment. There is a custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, a typewriter inserted with a blank sheet of paper, and the reference books stacked nearby. The magazine rack has Better Magazines, Harper\u2019s, The Atlantic, and The Saturday Review. There is also a small table and a sideboard with a bottle of bourbon and two snifter glasses on top. The fourth scene is on the highway where Quidley is stuck in the car. The rutted road with trees points towards a ship. A ship with its lock open is hiding in the trees. It is dark."}
{"id": "61048_5", "pid": "61048_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22886, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set in a city, but most of the action takes place in a library. While searching for a book in the library, Herbert comes across the weird messages that Kay and her crew used to communicate with each other. Some parts of the story also take place in a bar, which is where Kay and Herbert actually met. Herbert\u2019s apartment is also an important location, as it was where Herbert and Kay became closer. Lastly, Kay\u2019 ship is hidden within a forest, which is where the story ends. "}
{"id": "61048_5", "pid": "61048_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22886, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is set on planet Earth. It is set in a city, and the beginning of the story is inside of a library. There is a great number of books inside of the library, including old tomes. Whenever one of the women has to leave a message, they go to the \u2018T\u2019 section of English literature. The city also has an all-night coffee shop, where Quidley goes to bump into Kay in order to find out more about her. Quidley has an apartment himself, and Jillka is noted to live in a brick apartment building. It is later revealed that there is also a ship to take everybody back to Fieu Dayol, or Persei 17. It is noted that there is an unequal population-balance between the men and women there. \n"}
{"id": "61048_5", "pid": "61048_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Girls From Fieu Dayol\n \n\n By ROBERT F. YOUNG\n \n\n They were lovely and quick to learn\u2014and their only faults were little ones!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n \n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo\u2014te bijk weil en snoll doper\u2014Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.\n \n He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.\n \n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n \n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .\n \n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.\n \n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another\u2014seemingly at random\u2014and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.\n \n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface\u2014the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?\n \n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n\"Kai\"\u2014or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.\n \n By whom\u2014her boy friend?\n \n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n\"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.\n \n \n\n \n Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.\n \n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\n  asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling\u2014Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n \n \n Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew\u2014from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper \u2014that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word\u2014 Yoolna \u2014was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.\n \n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .\n \n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.\n \n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.\n \n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap\u2014\n \n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n \n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n\"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n \n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.\n \n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her\u2014\n \n \n Herbert Quidley: Profiliste\n \n \n Her forehead crinkled. \" Profiliste? \"\n \n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course.\"\n \n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n \n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss\u2014\"\n \n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear\u2014and suddenly cold\u2014blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?\"\n  Would he! \"When can I call?\"\n \n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our\u2014our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate.\"\n \n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect you?\"\n \n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\" she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n \n \"Perfectly.\"\n \n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n \n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.\n \n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.\n \n \n\n \n In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.\n \n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n \n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....\n \n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\n  fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!\u2014Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\n \n \n Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n \n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?\n \n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.\n \n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was\u2014the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two\u2014\n \n \n\n \n The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n \n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n \n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n \n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress\u2014never saw anything quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n\"It's\u2014it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm\u2014I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n \n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n\"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!\" \"It's\u2014it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um, kiss me again.\" \"I\u2014I never figured\u2014I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\n \n \n\n \n The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.\n \n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course\u2014notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of\u2014\n \n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n \n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:\n  a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro\u2014Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\n \n \n Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!\n \n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n \n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.\n \n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like \" ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?\"\n \n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n \n He remembered the material of her dress.\n \n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n \n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\n \n \n\n \n Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n \n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n \n \"Where are we going?\"\n \n \"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks.\"\n \n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n \n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n \n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n \n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n \n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a snoll doper ?\"\n \n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n \n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ,\" he said after a while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n \n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back.\"\n \n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth\u2014\n \n Her folks !\n \n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.\n \n \n\n \n A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n \n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n \n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n \n \"At your folks'?\"\n \n \"At the ship.\"\n \n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n\"What ship?\" he said.\n \n \"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on.\"\n \n \" Fieu Dayol? \"\n \n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?\"\n \n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n \n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n \n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?\"\n \n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids \u2014or mates\u2014on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n \n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n \n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl.\"\n \n \n\n \n April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she said.\n \n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n \n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n \n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her\u2014a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.\n \n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n \n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking me to another planet!\"\n \n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was,\" she said.\n\"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n\" This is a snoll doper .\"\n \n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n \n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n \n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the setting of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22841, "query_start_index": 22843, "query_end_index": 22886, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts at the library, where Quidley finds the undecipherable messages inside Taine's novel. The next day, he comes back there and then decides to follow Kay. He gets in his car and drives behind her until they both stop near an all-night coffee bar. They sit at the bar counter and talk. Two days later, Quidley goes to the library again and notices another girl. Later this evening, Kay arrives at his place. The room has a typewriter on his chrome-trimmed desk with crinkly sheets and reference books beside it, a bottle of bourbon and glasses on a sideboard, and a small table set for two. When Kay catches him reading their new message, she orders him to follow her. They get in her convertible and drive to a brick apartment building. She pulls over and enters the building. Minutes later, she walks back to the car, and they drive along a highway away from the city. She turns down a rutted road, and soon they reach a black blur of trees and a spherical ship that blends with its background. At the end, Quidley marches up the ship\u2019s plank. \n"}
{"id": "63867_1", "pid": "63867_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29700, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story follows the Martian Maid\u2019s journey and features its crew members: a captain nicknamed \u2018Captain Midas\u2019, Mister Spinelli the Third Officer, and various other shipmates. It is revealed that many of the crew members have a lust for making money, and an apt opportunity to do so is discovered when Mister Spinelli spots a derelict ship amongst the asteroids that could be claimed by them. After a first exploration, Midas ends up with a mystery metal collected from the starship. In his further investigation, he finds that this mystery metal transforms into a heavier metal with a yellow tinge - gold. At the same time, he finds that holding the metal evokes fatigue in him, particularly in his arms. This initial investigation was interrupted by Spinelli barging into Midas\u2019 quarters and spotting the gold. Fearful of the other shipmates knowing and hence collecting it for themselves, Midas threatens Spinelli\u2019s silence. \n\nMidas continues the acquisition of this derelict ship by sending a crew, led by Cohn, to further investigate and take control of the ship. With Midas and Spinelli left behind, they watch their shipmates enter the alien ship. While waiting to hear back from the crew, Midas notices that Spinelli has arranged the Maid\u2019s gun to point at the derelict ship and their crew mates. Initially enraged, Midas soon calms down as he begins to suspect that the rest of the crew knows about the gold and may be hatching an alternate plan. Two days past the check-in time, the pair receives a garbled message from the crew. Midas orders them to disembark and depart, but the starship begins to divert its course. In arguing between something being wrong and Spinelli telling the crew about the gold, Spinelli begins to inch towards the firing panel for the gun and a tussle emerges between the two with Midas killing him. \n\nAfter re-catching the derelict ship, Midas boards the ship to look for the rest of his crew mates. He finds the walls to turn into yellow metal and the decks to have a yellowish cast as well. Inside the ship, he sees skeletal and rusty versions of his crew, and comes to the horrifying realization that the transformation of the metal into gold comes at the expense of him and his crew member\u2019s youth and strength. Running from the ship, Midas reboards the Maid and quickly throws the alien ship back into space. Back on Callisto, the Foundation relieves him of his command as the illness spreads to the rest of his body. \n"}
{"id": "63867_1", "pid": "63867_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29700, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story is about the last spatial flight of Captain Midas. He lives in a time when humans have explored and deemed safe the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle. At the beginning, he talks about greedy human nature and what it can cause. Years ago, he was a skipper of the Martian Maid spaceship flying to Callisto. His crew - Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski - people with love for money, not noble pioneers. They detected a derelict in the supra-solar void between the EMV Triangle and the outer systems. First, they thought it was The Holcomb Foundation ship, but this one was the largest craft they had ever seen. It was on a near-collision course and probably came in from the direction of Coma Berenices - the stars. He gathered the crew and informed them that they were entitled to claim this derelict as salvage. Everyone got excited and started thinking about the money they could get for this craft. The skipper was supposed to report their finding to the EMV base. But Midas decided to do that after receiving the money for its parts. When they got near the craft, Midas noticed that the metal of its flanks was grained with glittering whorls. They realized it was a starship, and it probably had been roaming through space for millennia. It was gashed deeply by something. Cohn and three other men came back disappointed, saying there was nothing valuable inside. He brought two samples of the ship\u2019s metal. Midas examined the chunks at his work-table, and soon the metal grew yellower. He spent some time testing the sample, and it became stable, drawing the necessary energy from somewhere, and turned into gold. Spinelli unexpectedly came into his office and noticed the piece of gold. He volunteers to go onboard the derelict, but Midas refuses. He also orders Spinelli not to say anything about the precious stone. Captain then saw Spinelli murmuring something to Zaleski and also felt inexplicably tired. He assigned  Marvin and Chelly to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk in case of mutiny. With time, the number of messages from Cohn started decreasing, and they came through garbled. They sent a strange message that stated that they had lost control. Spinelli got infuriated and almost fired at the big ship from the supersonic rifle. Midas aggressively ordered him to stop, and Spinelli attacked him. After a short fight, Midas killed the officer and immediately noticed that his hands were sickly purple. He put on a pressure suit and decided to go onboard the derelict. Inside he saw his crewmates, their skeletal bodies, and old faces. The walls around them were gold. Midas realized that the ship\u2019s metal was taking the energy required to make it stable from people who touched it. He ran and threw all the gold away. Midas landed on Callisto and was relieved of his command. The illness slowly spread from his hands to other body parts. Now he\u2019s in a hospital and looks eighty though he\u2019s thirty two. \n\n\n"}
{"id": "63867_1", "pid": "63867_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29700, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Midas lives on the spacemen\u2019s pension from Holcomb Foundation. He starts a story about his experience of once having a tremendous amount of treasure. The story begins with him and the crew members on the spaceship Martian Maid when they find a massive derelict in the outer system of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle in space. Mister Spinelli is the first one to find the derelict. After he reports to the captain, and the captain measures the course of the derelict, they decide to search over the hulk based on the Space Regulation that any derelict belongs to the discoverer. They sense the chance of treasure in the derelict, searching over it without reporting to the nearest EMV base. At first, they do not find anything valuable inside the ship, so they decide to bring the whole derelict. Mister Cohn brings two pieces of the metal constituting the derelict to the captain.  When the captain examines the metal, he finds his hand grows bony and old while the metal becomes gold. He realizes that the metal can somehow transmute the energy to the property of metal, stabilizing itself to become gold. Mister Spinelli witnesses this discovery when the captain is trying in his room. When Mister Spinelli asks the captain whether he can help take the derelict abroad, the captain denies his request and orders him not to leak the information about the metal. Mister Spinelli tells Zaleski, who will take care of the derelict, about the metal. The captain orders the rest of the members to help Zaleski, ensuring that he cannot take the derelict himself. The captain sets the radar finder to watch the derelict. While Spinelli and the captain watch over the derelict with a turret pointing toward it, the message from Mister Cohn, who takes charge of the crew on the derelict, starts to decrease. When they find the derelict begins to get out of sight, Spinelli suspects them of betraying and attacks the captain, while the captain senses the danger of the decreasing message and fights back. The captain kills Mister Spinelli. As the captain examines his hand\u2019s condition, he realizes something goes wrong. The captain controls the Maid to catch up with the derelict, attempting to shoot it but fails. He wears the pressure suit and goes to the derelict, finding the prize crew aged and caress the metal. He realizes that the energy the metal draws comes from organic life, which in this situation is humans. He runs to the Maid, throws away any alien metals, and flees. And now, he lives on the spacemen\u2019s pension, old and weary when he should be young and strong."}
{"id": "63867_1", "pid": "63867_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29700, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The captain of the Martian Maid starts off describing gold and the greatness of the treasure. He begins to mention how old he is, and he is also poor because he would not be here otherwise. The man goes further on to describe how people of his generation did not let anything go because they were entitled to keep whatever they found. He begins talking about how he is the skipper of the Martian Maid, and the rest of the crew ride a golden ship that they paid for with their lives. He begins to talk about the experience not too long ago, how none of the crew would have known that this was their last flight. He thinks about the sweet payload they would pick up in Callisto from delivering all of the cargo. The captain also mentions how dangerous the asteroid belt was for astrogation at the time. The story then cuts to Spinelli reporting a derelict to the rest of the crew. Once they are near the collision, an abandoned spacer is found. However, even though they have claim over the ship, the captain\u2019s calculations show that it came from beyond the stars. Everybody becomes excited at the prospect of money; the derelict is much bigger than anything the Foundation Yards have ever built. It is also damaged too, as there is a gash from the stem to the stern with a jagged rip in its bare mangled innards. Some of the men are sent to go explore the ship, but they come back disappointed that there is nothing worthy left inside. The ship itself was never built to carry humans, but the crew still decides to take her along. When the captain puts the metal through the metallurgical testing kit, however, he discovers that it is gold. Spinelli tells him that the derelict is ready, but the captain makes him stay on the Maid with him. A few other members of the crew seem to be planning something, and the captain wonders if there is a chance that they will take off with the treasure ship. Spinelli reveals later that he did tell Zaleski about the gold, but they receive a message about losing control on the ship. Spinelli leaps at the captain, and the two of them fight. When the captain realizes that Spinelli is dead, he suddenly looks at his arms and sees how old he has become. He goes to the gold ship and sees the rest of the crew as almost skeletal beings. Realizing that the gold draws energy from them, he discards all of it and speeds away in the Maid. He is relieved of his duty on Callisto, and the Foundation refuses him another ship. The captain is thirty-two, but he looks eighty and is stuck on a hospital cot. The bitterest part is people laugh and call him Captain Midas when he tells this story. "}
{"id": "63867_2", "pid": "63867_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Midas and what are some of his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29732, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Midas is the captain of the spaceship Martian Maid, who unknowingly takes the spaceship on its last flight in this story. He is described to be relatively young at 32 years old, but after interacting with the metal and at the end of the story, has the physical appearance of an eighty year old man with wrinkles and veiny hands. \n\nHe is a greedy man. In the beginning of the story, he honestly admits that he would do quite a few things for a few solar dollars, which we see throughout the story. In addition to his greed, he is a selfish man, as in discovering the gold he threatens Spinelli to secrecy in order to keep the highest gains for himself. It is also this greed that allows Spinelli to get away with initially aiming the gun at the derelict ship and their fellow shipmates on board in case those shipmates try to escape with the gold.  \n\nThere are brief moments where he is shown to be an honorable man. For one, he fights Spinelli over blasting their fellow shipmates, and ends up killing Spinelli instead by accident. At the end of the story, he becomes terrified of the derelict ship and its devil metal, and yet still chooses to go aboard it to seek out his shipmates. \n"}
{"id": "63867_2", "pid": "63867_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Midas and what are some of his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29732, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Midas is a spaceman, a skipper of the Martian Maid spaceship. He is confident, experienced, and a natural leader - he can feel how the mood of his crew changes and what they are able to do. He knows how Spinelli and Zaleski can act if they find out about the gold and tries to be cautious. He is greedy - Midas gets blinded by the prospect of getting lots of money for the metal parts of the derelict and initially doesn\u2019t notice the metal\u2019s unique feature. Still, he values his team and finds it disgusting that Spinelli would be ready to kill his own colleagues for some gold. Midas also attempts to learn what happened to them when Spinelli gets out of control and thinks that the other members of the team betrayed him and stole his gold. He doesn\u2019t feel normal after killing Spinelli - Midas doesn\u2019t enjoy violence. "}
{"id": "63867_2", "pid": "63867_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Midas and what are some of his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29732, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Midas is the captain of the spaceship Martian Maid. He looks bony, wrinkled, and weary. He looks eighty when he is thirty-two. He is greedy for money as he and the whole crew search every possibility in space to find treasure or things that can be traded for money. His greed also makes him not report to the interplanetary base when the crew finds the derelict. He prioritizes his lust for treasure over his duty as a captain, suspecting everyone on the ship to steal the derelict, but he also maintains his reason in the situation where the lust for treasure may surpass his duty as a captain. This can be shown when Mister Spinelli and the captain find it hard to read the message from the crewmembers on the derelict; he senses the danger while Mister Spinelli only thinks about his treasure. He is rational that all his actions have a reason, such as letting Mister Spinelli set the weapon pointing toward the derelict to ensure the rest of the crew members do not steal the treasure and flee. He has the moral that he feels guilty when he kills Mister Spinelli."}
{"id": "63867_2", "pid": "63867_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Captain Midas and what are some of his characteristics?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29732, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The captain of the Martian Maid, nicknamed Captain Midas, is the skipper of the boat. He works alongside the rest of the crew, consisting of Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, and Zaleski. The captain is only thirty-two, but he looks eighty by the end of the story. Physically, he is described as having gray hair, flesh hanging off of his bone like a yellow cloth, and face a mask. He is a hard-working man, willing to go to any means to earn his share of money. He is also poor, which is why he was so driven to keep the treasure ship when he found it. Captain Midas, however, is a lot more level-headed than the rest of the crew. He is aware of the dangers of being gold-hungry, which is why he keeps this finding to himself. The captain is also observant, figuring out the ship had come from beyond the stars based on his charts. However, even though he is a lot more level-headed, the captain is also susceptible to the idea of becoming insanely rich off of the golden ship. He is not against taking the ship with them and even sleeps with the gold chunk underneath his bed. Midas is also not afraid to use brute force, considering how he killed Spinelli when the other man attacked. "}
{"id": "63867_3", "pid": "63867_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "This story takes place in the Holcomb Foundation aboard Martian Maid. The Martian Maid is a grand ship that took off from Solis Lacus on its last flight; the ship spanned 200 feet in its length and despite its sleek exterior, was an armed ship as well. The Maid was on an orbit in a region strewn with asteroids between the outer systems and the EMV triangle. \n\nAboard the spaceship, interactions between the characters in the story largely took place in the Control room. It also takes place in Captain Midas\u2019 quarters, where he investigates the mystery metal. The setting also changes to include the derelict ship the crewmates had found, which presented itself as a shell of a vessel with torn interiors and yellow-tinged walls. \n"}
{"id": "63867_3", "pid": "63867_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After the character\u2019s inner monologue finishes, Midas starts talking about the day his team took off on the Martian Maid spaceship. He watched the lights of Canalopolis: gin mills and houses reflected on the ancient canal\u2019s water, the bright moons cast their shadows across the banks. They were leaving the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle and moving towards the outer systems, specifically the planet called Callisto. Midas spent most of his time in the Control room. He gathered the crew there to tell them about the derelict. At his quarters, Midas examined the metal samples sitting at his work-table. Days later, in the control room with a control panel, a radar finder, and a firing console, Midas killed Spinelli, who had attacked him. He then decided to find his team. He entered the living quarters of the prize crew. The walls were gleaming. Then, Midas swiftly reached the Maid and flew to Callisto. Now he\u2019s in a hospital cot.\n\n"}
{"id": "63867_3", "pid": "63867_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story happens on two spaceships. One is Martian Maid, which is a two hundred feet long spaceship. It is sleek, chemical-fueled, and spherical. It is equipped with weapons, such as turrets. There is a telescope, radar, and a book rack above the desk in the captain\u2019s room. The other is the derelict. It is tremendously gigantic. It has a sleek torpedo shape with unknown alienness. Its flanks are constituted with glittering whorls. It is torn apart severely. There are a few storage compartments inside."}
{"id": "63867_3", "pid": "63867_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of this story.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29705, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story is primarily set in space. When the Martian Maid first takes off, it leaves from Solis Lacus after being taken out of the Foundation Yards. The ship is headed towards Callisto, where everybody will be receiving a fat paycheck. There is a Earth-Mars-Venus triangle that provides relative security for space travel. However, the outer systems are much more dangerous. The Captain also watches Canalopolis from a distance before he has to leave. The Maid has a scope position and living quarters for the crew. There is also an area called Control, where everybody is called to meet. The golden ship they find is made fully out of gold. The treasure ship has yellowish decks and an airlock compartment set aside for the crew. The entire ship gleams, but it is made out of devil metal. After the captain escapes to Callisto, he is subjected to a hospital cot for the rest of his life. "}
{"id": "63867_4", "pid": "63867_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Midas and Mister Spinelli.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29738, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Mister Spinelli is Third Officer under the command of Captain Midas and was the first to report the derelict ship and observe its potential to be claimed by the Maid. Spinelli is the first and only crew member to identify the metal from the abandoned ship as gold when he saw Captain Midas with it. The tension between Midas and Spinelli escalates and their relationship becomes antagonistic as both of them desire to benefit the most from this valuable gold and with Midas constantly pulling his authority over Spinelli. After Midas barrs him from being a part of the investigative crew, suspicion arises between the two as Spinelli suspects Midas wishes to keep the pot of gold for himself and Midas thinks that Spinelli may be telling others. This tension further escalates as Midas sees Spinelli nearly hit the trigger of the gun and in rage, the two end up fighting each other before Midas aimed a kick at his temple and killed him. \n"}
{"id": "63867_4", "pid": "63867_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Midas and Mister Spinelli.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29738, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Midas knows about Mister Spinelli\u2019s hunger for money and gold. When the officer noticed the chunk of gold on Midas\u2019 table, the captain started analyzing what the crewman could do. He refused to allow Spinelli to go aboard the derelict, and from this point, their relationship became tense. The crewman suspected the captain of an intention to take all the gold. Midas saw that Spinelli told Zaleski about gold and sent several other crew members to the derelict with Zaleski and Cohn to avoid double-crossing or mutiny. When they left, he realized that Spinelli aimed the Maid\u2019s firing projector at the derelict and the crew members there in case they decided to betray Spinelli. Midas got angry but decided to leave this way. When their colleagues sent a message about the lost control and then stopped answering, Spinelli became mad. Midas attempted to keep Spinelli in control, but the man was already approaching the firing panel. Spinelli got an order to leave the control room, but he exploded and attacked his superior. In an aggressive fight, Midas killed his team member. "}
{"id": "63867_4", "pid": "63867_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Midas and Mister Spinelli.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29738, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The relationship between Captain Midas and Mister Spinelli changes from supportive to hostile throughout the story. When Mister Spinelli finds the massive derelict in the space, he reports back to Captain Midas. He actively suggests searching over the hulk, where his relationship with Captain Midas is superior-subordinate and obeying. However, when Captain Midas finds out that the mysterious metal sought from the derelict can somehow turn into gold, which Mister Spinelli witnesses, their greed sprouts the tension and suspicion between them as they start to suspect each other of trying to have the gold by themselves. The first tension arises when Captain Midas does not allow Mister Spinelli to move the hulk. In addition, Mister Spinelli disobeys Captain Midas\u2019s order not to tell other crew members about the metal. The second tension arises when Mister Spinelli uses the weapon on the spaceship pointing toward the derelict to ensure no one can steal his share of the metal. Captain Midas is raged about his action at first, but he accepts that. The last tension arises when they lose the signal from other crew members, causing them to suspect the betrayal of other members. From then on, Mister Spinelli attacks Captain Midas, and they fight until Captain Midas kills Mister Spinelli. Until this point, their relationship is hostile and competitive in the sense of the ownership of the metal."}
{"id": "63867_4", "pid": "63867_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the relationship between Captain Midas and Mister Spinelli.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29738, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Captain Midas and Mister Spinelli initially get along fine. Spinelli listens to all of his orders, and the Captain considers him to be a reliable member of the crew. There is no sense of hostility between them, and he even agrees with Spinelli\u2019s proposal to look the ship over. However, this relationship later sours once Spinelli finds out that the discovered ship is made out of gold. The captain is wary because Spinelli is big and dangerous, preferring to keep an eye on him in case anything goes wrong. Spinelli, on the other hand, is suspicious of the captain and goes off to tell Zaleski even though the captain said to not mention the gold to any of the rest of the crew. The captain threatens to clap Spinelli to irons, but this threat does not work because the Third Officer chooses to disobey his orders anyways. Later, Spinelli and the captain get into conflict again, with Spinelli accusing the captain that he was planning to keep all of the treasure for himself. Spinelli assumes that everybody is faking it to keep the ship, but the captain knocks him away. The two of them fight brutally, and Captain Midas has to end up killing Spinelli. "}
{"id": "63867_5", "pid": "63867_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mystery metal from the starship?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mystery metal is significant because it initially attracted the crew\u2019s interest due to their greed - they had hoped to tear about the derelict starship and sell its pieces for millions. When the Captain tested out the mysterious metal and saw that it turned out to be gold, his greed increased so much that he became suspicious of his crew members that were sent out to investigate the ship. \n\nAlthough the Captain and his crew thought they could take advantage of this metal and benefit from it, it turns out that the opposite is true. Instead, it is this mystery metal that gains its yellow-tint and subsequent gold composition through drawing its energy from them and draining the crew of their youth and strength. The latter named \u2018devil-metal\u2019 demonstrates the hastiness of the greed of man, and how it led them to be so enraptured in greed that it blinded them of the wariness of strange objects in space, and hence led to their ultimate demise. \n"}
{"id": "63867_5", "pid": "63867_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mystery metal from the starship?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "All the spacemen in this story are greedy and materialistic. When the Maid\u2019s crew finds the derelict, they think of selling its parts. This thought cheers them up. Then Midas finds out the starship\u2019s metal can turn into gold, and Spinelli learns that, too. Eventually, this chunk of gold makes Midas\u2019 hands slowly decay while he sleeps with it every night. Spinelli becomes more and more suspicious and suspects everyone to be a traitor. Eventually, Midas realizes the starship\u2019s metal has some evil in it. When he finds his team almost dead and still trying to climb the golden walls of the room, he understands that the metal takes the energy required for its stability from humans. This gold quite literally kills. Greed ends the lives of almost all crewmates of the Maid and leaves Midas to slowly die in a hospital cot, regretting his lethal hunger for money."}
{"id": "63867_5", "pid": "63867_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mystery metal from the starship?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mystery metal from the derelict can draw energy from life and turn itself into gold through the transmutation of the energy. In the story, the crews on Maid, a spaceship, find a large derelict constituted of this mysterious metal and bring it with them. Soon after they find out its property of becoming gold, they start to fight with each other and caress the metal unstoppably, but they do not know where the energy that makes the metal change comes from. After the captain kills one crewmember, finding the lost signals and weirdness of his hand and the metal, he realizes the metal draws the needed energy from humans. The mysterious metal plays a significant role in that it triggers the greed of the crewmembers to cause them to fight, symbolizing the cursed treasure. It is also the leading cause that most crew members die or mutate, except for the captain, showing that any treasure comes with a cost, in which case, the mysterious metal is the treasure, and the life is the cost."}
{"id": "63867_5", "pid": "63867_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nCAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at the torn derelict floating against the velvet void. Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....\n \n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....\n \n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot\u2014wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.\n \n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n \n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger\u2014and horror.\n \n \n\n \n If you doubt that\u2014and I can see you do\u2014just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n \n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.\n \n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.\n \n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n \n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.\n \n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.\n \n In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.\n \n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n \n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n \n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big\u2014bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.\n \n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to you?\"\n \n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct, Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.\n \n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n \n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.\n \n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n \n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage.\"\n \n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n \n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n \n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ... you think it came from the stars , Captain?\"\n \n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n \n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.\n \n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n \n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n \n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n\"Certainly!\"\n \n \n\n \n The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.\n \n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n \n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?\n \n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.\n \n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.\n \n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.\n \n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n \n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.\n \n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this stuff....\"\n \n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n \n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything....\"\n \n The metal was heavy\u2014too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?\n \n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier ....\n \n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.\n \n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal\u2014the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built\u2014was now....\n  Gold!\n \n \n I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!\n \n \n I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element\u2014wonderfully, miraculously gold!\n \n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\n \n \n\n \n A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n \n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my quarters!\"\n \n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.\n \n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n \n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n \n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n \n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n \n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n \n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?\"\n \n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.\n \n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.\n \n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n \n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n \n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.\n \n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n \n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\n \n \n\n \n Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.\n \n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.\n \n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.\n \n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now\u2014\n \n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n \n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n \n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n \n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....\n \n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.\n \n \"They're faking!\"\n \n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n \n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n \n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n \n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!\"\n \n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n \n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n \n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n \n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n \n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ... sir.\"\n \n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.\n \n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.\n \n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n \n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n \n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n \n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.\n \n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.\n \n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n \n \" Spinelli! \"\n \n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.\n \n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n \n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n \n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\n \n \n\n \n He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.\n \n \n I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.\n \n\n \n Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open,\n glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for\n his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I\n felt sick inside, and dizzy.\n \n I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the\n steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had\n increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms\n ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of\n their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my\n face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins\n standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking\n on that same aged look.\n \n I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the\n flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow\n gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space\n that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that\n contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.\n \n I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it,\n piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the\n Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her,\n and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest\n of my men. It would have been better if I had!\n \n I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and\n set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond\n caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with\n my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark\n hole.\n \n I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting\n long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish\n cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....\n \n As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living\n quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy\n little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the\n distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying\n perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman,\n not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what\n had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow\n metal.\n \n The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the\n chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ...\n at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The\n brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.\n \n And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal\n things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous\n obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the\n rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with\n claw-like hands. They were old, old!\n \n I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That\n devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed\n from ... us !\n \n My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the\n gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men.\n The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!\n \n I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands\n burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my\n veins, ghastly and sure....\n \n I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space\n as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its\n load of ancient evil....\n \n \n\n \n On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted\n me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another\n ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see.\n Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a\n spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most\n great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the\n dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ...\n all of it.\n \n But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty!\n I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people\n laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my\n nickname. Have you heard it?\n \n It's ... Captain Midas.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the mystery metal from the starship?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29658, "query_start_index": 29660, "query_end_index": 29734, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The mystery metal, later revealed to be \u2018gold\u2019, is significant because it is what drives the crew to want to become rich and leads to their downfall. When the captain first discovers it is gold, he thinks about how wealthy the entire crew will become once they reach Callisto and sell it off. The mystery metal is worth a lot of money, and it is what makes them decide to take the entire ship with them. However, this metal is also deadly because it sucks the energy from the crew. Out of their greed, they fail to realize that the gold drains their lifespan away to continue functioning. The crew has to pay the ultimate price with their lives, and only Captain Midas survives the incident. Even as they are old and skeletal, the rest of the crew do not want to give up the possibility of gold. When the captain goes to Callisto, everybody scorns him and laughs at him despite how terrible his story is about the gold. "}
